The Electric State Is A Terrible Sci-Fi Movie
The Electric State Goes Downhill Over Its Runtime
The Electric State is terrible. A very generic plot with guessable moments at every stage only highlights how nonsensical the out-there worldbuilding becomes.
And this is even more annoying because it had promise. It had a lot of promise. The opening scenes create an initial world that somehow—without it feeling that odd—combines the idea of separating your mind from Severance with a believable robot uprising. I actually totally buy that humans would end up relying on remote-controlled machines right after fighting a very bloody war with autonomous A.I. beings. It’s bleak, but it makes a sort of sense. Each step that leads to the dystopian scenario feels believable.
The Opening Exposition At Least Is Super Creative
But then we exit the engaging part of The Electric State and drop into the generic “save the sibling” plot with a teenage, individualist orphan protagonist who must escape her bad home life, travel into a world of danger, and become a world-changing hero. And yes, of course, her adoptive parent is a stereotype. And yes, the plot involves a side quest where they have to find a roguish character. Hell, she even has the now-common very thinly veiled “social media is bad and I live in the real world” bent to her personality, as she is shown to not like using the very common virtual reality headsets. Some moments even imply she’s never put one on, as unrealistic as that would be in a world that seems to utterly rely on them.
But The Electric State has no issue implying baffling things, so why not add another? This is a movie that doesn’t examine what it would mean to separate someone’s consciousness into two simultaneous perceptions. How on Earth would that affect someone’s working memory or even sense of self? It also doesn’t examine the multiple plotlines that deal with putting copies or extensions of human minds into robot bodies, despite that having huge existential implications. Entire science fiction books and franchises have explored these ideas, but The Electric State shoves it under the rug almost entirely.
The Electric State Skips Past Fascinating Concepts
It even fails to properly address the horrifying treatment of the robots. Some scenes do acknowledge it briefly, but this is a movie about robots who were created by humans to be slaves. That should be brought up more. The Electric State details the history of how humans fought a horrible war with robots when they refused to continue to be slaves and then shoved the surviving robots into an almost completely empty wasteland—where some robots are desperate enough to commit acts of cannibalism. It’s even established multiple times that it’s basically entirely legal for a human to murder a robot without trial if a robot basically does anything to better their circumstances. One of the main villains in this movie is a human who hunts robots for sport and keeps their corpses.
But no, again, we’re doing the adventure road trip movie with “quippy” dialog—that’s often very not funny and at least once problematic—and broad, heavily telegraphed character arcs. This is not a popcorn movie. This is a movie that doesn’t want to be what it’s about. It doesn’t trust the audience, and it doesn’t trust itself.
The Electric State Lays On Its Character Arcs Thick
And I want to be clear that this isn’t the acting or the visual presentation’s fault. The CGI often looks incredible—especially when the huge mascot robots move around—and I enjoyed this cast. They’re all great actors, and they make these cartoonish or cliché characters as real-feeling as they could. It’s the slapdash storytelling all the way.
And what’s worse is I can see how this could’ve been good, even with this framework. Like, for instance, our main female character lost her entire family but is the one refusing to go into the escapist machines. That’s an interesting response to trauma. Our main male character is a contraband runner who clearly has a love for old-world stuff and is one of the few humans not even remotely bigoted toward the robots. That’s also an interesting response to his past. Even our main, main villain is a doomsday nihilist who nonetheless seems to think of his alternative reality machines as a sort of numbing agent for a dying world. Why wasn’t that given a full-scale monolog, if nothing else?
All the way up to the simultaneously bleak and very saccharine ending, The Electric State continuously made me low-key annoyed. I was willing to give it so much grace and ignore so many dropped balls, but it never stopped failing somewhere. It’s a tonal mess. A movie’s opening scenes shouldn’t be the highlight of the entire viewing experience, but after it, The Electric State never reaches any higher than generic, and most of the time it’s below that.
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