THE ELECTRIC STATE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Electric State, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 13, 2025

The makers of The Electric State take this material seriously. One must question such an approach to material that features a robotic brand mascot in an important supporting role and includes the line, "You broke the treaty, Mr. Peanut!" That one's sure to become an oft-quoted exclamation among those who take some amount pleasure in weirdly bad movie dialogue.

Yes, the top-hatted, monocle-wearing peanut is a major player in Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's screenplay (adapted from a book by Simon Stålenhag), and we have to wonder if the idea of that strange tie-in came from the filmmakers or the peanut sellers. Those are sorts of the questions fraternal directors Anthony and Joe Russo's movie raises, because it's not as if the characters and world of this story are worth much thought.

The premise is at least a little fun, because it's set in an alternative past that has been affected by the creation and propagation of robots some decades prior to the 1990s. They began as mascots made by Walt Disney, became a trend among other companies looking to add some high-tech oomph to their marketing, and eventually started overtaking the work force. Before the plot proper begins, we discover that robots, which must have also been programmed to have something akin to sentience, are fed up with being treated in such a demeaning way, and tensions rise to the point of all-out war between robots and humans.

Obviously, this raises far too many questions about the entire back story of this world—why humanity made robots in this way, for example and forced them into a kind of slavery, despite knowing that they're capable of reasoning their way into revolution and without some kind of fail safe to prevent that from happening in the first place. As for the robots, they're only occasionally presented as legitimate characters in this story, and even then, they're regularly used as comic relief. If the filmmakers want us to have sympathy for the machines before their uprising or after their defeat and mass imprisonment, this isn't the way to do it.

Most of the story is set after the human-robot war in mid-1990s. It revolves around Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a foster kid whose family was killed, not by robots (even though that would both make sense and might add some actual conflict to the characters within the tale), but in a car crash. One night, a random robot named Cosmo (voice of Alan Tudyk), based on a cartoon character she and her genius younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) liked, shows up at her current foster home. It can only speak in the cartoon's catch phrases, but Michelle figures out that Christopher's mind is somehow inhabiting the robot.

The rest of the story, then, follows the pair as they search for Christopher's body, which must be alive somewhere. That leads them to the large exclusion zone for robots in the middle of the New Mexico desert, where they meet scavenger Keats (Chris Pratt), his robot buddy Herman (voice of Anthony Mackie), a whole slew of outcast bots living in a mall, and, of course, a dour and human-distrusting Mr. Peanut (voice of Woody Harrelson). The crew is also pursued by Col. Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito), who pilots a model of humanoid droid that helped humanity defeat the robots, and Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), a tech mogul who knows the Cosmo robot is the key to his widespread virtual reality technology.

Ultimately, little of these details matter beyond the plot, which comes down to an extended chase through several dystopian locations and that introduces even more actors, either in the flesh or vocally, to waste. Ke Huy Quan, for example, plays the scientist who knows the truth about Christopher's fate, and while there's some potential in his hideout at an abandoned carnival occupied by killer robots, that sequence essentially comes down to Quan's Dr. Amherst explaining everything we've already suspected about the real threat in the story. At least the likes of Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, and Brian Cox only provide voices for robots.

The world here is dim and grim in a way that still looks very expensive, since most or all of the robots are computer-generated creations. Meanwhile, the tone alternates drastically between the severity of Michelle's hunt for her long-thought-dead brother, Keats and Herman's bickering, and the movie playing the robots as oppressed figures about whose plight we should care and for wacky comedy.

Ultimately, The Electric State does want us to take all of this very seriously, perhaps as an allegory for, well, something or other. A movie that somehow sees a robotic Mr. Peanut as a sincere figurehead to be treated with respect, obviously, isn't exactly going to know what it's trying to say.

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