'The Electric State' Review: Are Filmmakers Training AI, or Is AI Now Training the Russo Brothers?

Fun fact: 320 million is 21.3 times more than 15 million. The Electric State, the newest Russo Brothers-Netflix venture, cost 21.3 times more to make than Godzilla Minus One. If you’ve seen both films, you’ll know what a mind-boggling statistic that is. Watching the Russos’ latest floundering attempt at filmmaking (I’m not convinced they even want to make a good movie at this point), I couldn’t help but feel like one of the goons terrorising Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski at the start of the Coen Brothers’ 1998 classic: Sticking the inferior brothers’ heads down the toilets while demanding with rage, ‘Where’s the money, Russos?! Where’s the goddamn money?!’

The bewildering disconnect between the project’s budget and what we see on the screen is by far the most (read: only) compelling part of The Electric State. The last film the Russos made, 2022’s The Gray Man, committed the cardinal sin of squandering one of the most delightful sights in mainstream American cinema: Ryan Gosling doing comedy. To atone for sins of my own, I was assigned the review here. At the time, I called it ‘A shrug. A tonally messy, dramatically empty, visually incoherent plastic approximation of better films.’ I think I went far too easy on it, and it has only soured more and more in my memory as time has passed. As bad as The Gray Man was, however, it felt like it was at least trying to imitate some better films. I have no idea what The Electric State was trying to do. In adapting Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel of the same name for the streaming giant, the Russos seem to have just wanted to replicate some of Stålenhag’s nostalgia-flavored techapocalypse imagery in a different medium, but without actually using the things unique to that medium to do anything with it. That’s the only way to interpret the end result.

I haven’t read the source material, but I can only assume that whatever accompanies the visual element must be more interesting and well-executed than what we see in the Russos’ meandering, pointless adaptation. The complete absence of any dramatic core or narrative tension makes it exceedingly difficult to talk about. I sat through this thing, and I’m really struggling to describe what happens in it, even with the help of my notes. Near enough as I can make out, the film is set in an alternate version of our reality, in which AI-powered robots were developed far sooner than in our own world. The ’90s, to be exact. Naturally, humanity exploited them, and they eventually rebelled, leading to a civil war, which they also ended up losing thanks to humanity developing the technology that allowed humans to pilot robot soldiers in battle. We see this history play out in flashbacks and then are taken to the present day and the aftermath of the war. Robots live in reservations, and there’s a generic atmosphere of oppression and capitalist gloom—without describing it as much, of course. Millie Bobby Brown plays [the protagonist], an orphan whose brother also died at some point along with her parents, but who, [the protagonist] now discovers, might be alive after all because he—I think—was somehow central to the machinations of the Big Bad (Stanley Tucci, why?).

The rest of the movie follows Brown and her bad wig teaming up with Chris Pratt and his bad wig to find her brother. If, along the way, they learn more about the world and its history, discover more about themselves and grow as people, and get involved in some entertaining action set pieces, then that’s great—that’s the magic of movies, baby! Except no. None of that happens. You might be forgiven for thinking it does if you walk past the screen and occasionally glance at it while the movie plays as you do housework—increasingly the raison d’être for these things— as there are surface-level hints that this is what we’re supposed to be seeing happen, but none of it actually happens. This is a phantom movie. A piece of (ludicrously expensive) algorithmic ephemera. Content. If you actually try to pay attention to the film, the nonexistence of the medium’s key elements is painfully obvious. On top of all that, it is hideous to look at, and its cast all look like they would rather be somewhere else. In an era of actors fighting tooth and nail to not be replaced by AI, this is one project they’d probably have preferred to just sign off their AI versions to star in.

The common refrain now is that human movies are being used to train AI filmmaking bots. The Electric State posits the question: Are filmmakers training AI, or is AI now training the Russo Brothers?