Transcription
Hi, I'm Apossum, and I find garbage. Today's garbage is The Electric State, a movie made by overcompensating Netflix boardroom executives who drive Lamborghinis and can't satisfy their wives.
This movie is based on a graphic novel I never read about a girl and her robot companion traveling across a post-apocalyptic America, which has been destroyed by some kind of war, and the landscape is now littered with the ruins of a hyperconsumerous society. So now the whole country looks like one huge abandoned theme park. Unfortunately, this is a Netflix movie, and we all know how their adaptations turn out. This movie somehow cost $320 million, which makes it one of the most expensive movies ever made. I wonder how much of that went to Gus from Breaking Bad, who filmed a grand total of one scene standing up. It's actually infuriating to think that someone could have $320 million to spend on a project and then they make something as forgettable and uncreative as this movie. Just imagine how many smaller movies that money could have been used for.
But that's the paradox of having such a huge budget. In theory, you have essentially infinite resources to do whatever you want. But in practice, when you have to return on that big of an investment, you have to play it safe and not do anything too weird. You have to make something as bland, inoffensive, predictable, and dumb as possible to appeal to as many normies as you can. You know, Netflix spent $98 million on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance back in 2019 and then canceled it after one season because it didn't immediately do Stranger Things numbers, but then they went and spent more than three times that amount on this garbage adaptation of a book most people have never heard of.
All right, before I get to the meat of this review, let me just give a quick rundown of what happens in this movie. The movie starts with a prologue explaining that at some point in the 1950s, the Walt Disney Company created robots for their theme parks. And then other companies started making robots for various commercial purposes, and they became ubiquitous. But then they decided to revolt against their human masters, and a war broke out in the 1990s. A thinly veiled Steve Jobs-standing named Ethan Skate invented drones that could be piloted by humans through a sort of remote brain-computer interface called a neurocaster, and they won the war. The leader of the robots, Mr. Peanut, yes, the Planters mascot—so you can guess who sponsored this movie—reluctantly signed a treaty agreeing to allow the remaining robots to be forced to live in an exclusion zone somewhere in the desert. And the neurocaster network became commercialized, and everyone became addicted to it.
Then, in 1994, a teenage girl named Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, is an orphan because her family was killed in a car crash. So, she now lives with a foster caregiver who she hates. One night, a robot breaks into her house and manages to convince her it's being controlled remotely by her brother Chris, who she thought was dead. But the robot can only communicate through catchphrases for some reason. So, she has to interpret what he says. He tells her they need to find a scientist who knows where his human body is being kept. But since robots aren't allowed outside the exclusion zone, they have to evade the authorities, namely a retired army guy called the butcher, played by Gus from Breaking Bad, who uses a drone body to chase them so they could film all of his scenes sitting down. Michelle and robot Chris hitch a ride on a truck driven by a smuggler type named Keats, portrayed by Chris Pratt, who plays him like the same quippy, annoying character he always plays, and his robot companion, Herman. But Gus follows them to his hideout on the edge of the exclusion zone. And the place gets destroyed as they escape, trapping them with the robots. They make their way to an old shopping mall where Mr. Peanut and the other robots hide from evil robots called scavengers, or scavs for short, who kill other robots and take their parts. And he helps them find a creepy old carnival where the scientist, Dr. Amorest, is hiding out. I mean, where else is a scientist supposed to hide? An abandoned mental asylum, a haunted mansion, a cursed mummy's tomb. Don't be ridiculous. He explains that the company he used to work for, which is run by Ethan Skate, took Chris's body and are now using his unique super-genius brain to run the neurocaster network that everyone uses to control their drones. Yeah. In this world in which the technology exists to make thinking and feeling robots with artificial brains capable of humanlike intelligence, they need the brain of this child who the movie tells us is the smartest person in the world, even though he never demonstrates it, to run the network that enables human operators to control drones because they can't just make a remote control.
Anyway, Gus shows up with the drones from the company. Dr. Amherst is killed in the ensuing shootout, and robot Chris gets captured. Michelle and the others go back to the mall and find it's been attacked while they were gone. And after the second act low point, they decide to go to the headquarters of the corporation to get Chris back. Michelle breaks in while Keats and Mr. Peanut lead an army of robots who all got out of the exclusion zone they were trapped in by having one of the robots just press some buttons because it was that easy and they could have done that any time, but just decided not to until now to attack the building, prompting Skate to send his drone army outside to fight them. Michelle finds Chris's human body, and it turns out he's in a coma, so she can only talk to him through the network. So she puts on a headset to enter his mind, and he tells her she has to kill him to destroy the neurocaster network. Eventually, she does, and the drones deactivate. Skate gets arrested for kidnapping while trying to flee the country. Michelle goes to live with the robots who record a video telling everyone to get over the fact that their in-universe equivalent of the internet is now gone forever. And then we see Chris's robot body being dumped in a junkyard somewhere. But it turns out he's still alive. Then the movie ends.
The movie doesn't do much with its premise. It's a post-apocalyptic world with robots that look like advertising mascots, and that creates a unique aesthetic, but they don't do anything with it. They could have had a theme about how rampant consumerism leads to overexploitation of the Earth's natural resources and results in ecological disaster, while people increasingly tie their happiness to the unsustainable constant acquisition of products so they can get short-term dopamine hits at the expense of long-term fulfillment. But considering how Netflix's entire business model is built on getting people to binge-watch content and they need mindless consumers who can't stand to be without stimulation for five minutes, I can see why they might decide that it's not in their best interest to speak out against the mouse utopia. But as it stands, there's no real in-universe reason the robots have to be like they are when they could have just as easily been like the robots from something like AI artificial intelligence or iRoot or even the creator. It really is just a meaningless aesthetic and nothing more. From what I understand, the book isn't even about the robots. They're just a feature in the horrifying landscape. But Netflix decided to make the movie about the funny robots without understanding their purpose in the story.
On that note, the tone is all over the place. You would think a movie which starts with a bunch of Disney World robots rebelling and President Clinton signing a peace treaty with Mr. Peanut would be really goofy and not take itself seriously, but the movie is really schmaltzy at times, and Mr. Peanut himself is really dour and serious. Maybe they were going for a Pixar thing where they have all these silly characters, but it ends up being a really emotional story, but they don't even commit to it because a lot of the time they do that stupid Marvel movie thing where something emotional and serious would be happening, but then they immediately undercut it with some dumb joke or gag. At the same time, the plot of the movie centers around the child being kept alive against his will by an evil corporation who exploits him for their own financial gain. So, he's forced to project his mind into a robot body to escape. That's an inherently disturbing concept, which in another movie would be great fodder for a dark dystopian sci-fi thriller, but it's in a Chris Pratt family comedy, and the source material is dark and dystopian. I've never even read the book, but even I could tell they just took the most surface-level elements of the story, dumbed them down, and Hollywoodized it. It's an insult. The smiling happy faces of the mascot robots and advertisements juxtaposed with the decaying ruins of America suggest a world which pretended everything was fine until it fell apart because everyone was too preoccupied consuming and giving into their desires. None of this is meant to be cute and kid-friendly. It's supposed to be disturbing. What they did with the movie is stupid.
I've heard that Netflix actually has an internal mandate from their executives to make movies dumb on purpose, so people who screw around on their phones while watching them or who just put them on as background noise while they do something else can still follow along. And that's why characters will just bluntly explain whatever their actions and intentions are, which goes against everything any creative writing class would ever tell you and is actually an insult to film as a visual art form. But if Netflix really expects people to only half pay attention to their pseudo-films, then that's an acknowledgement that their movies are disposable, essentially equivalent to long-form TikTok videos for idiots with short attention spans. And if that's the case, why spend $320 million on something you don't even expect anyone to actually watch? The ironic thing is the book presents the aftermath of a world destroyed by rampant consumerism. But this movie adaptation of that book represents the pinnacle of corporate thinking and that was designed from the ground up to appeal to the lowest common denominator and cater to the absolute worst tendencies of the dumbest, most dopamine-poisoned members of the modern audience. Complete with a major character who's literally a product placement. This movie is exactly the sort of thing that would be found in the ruins of the wasteland of the electric state, sandwiched between a pit of Funko Pops and a mountain of McRibs.
Speaking of McDonald's, kids might like this movie, or at least the ones who still have attention spans longer than 10 seconds will. But it's not going to stick with them. Just like McDonald's, they're not going to get any nutritive substance from it. It's likely bad for them, and they're not even going to remember the experience after it's over. And also like McDonald's, the only saving grace is that if you already have a Netflix account, then it's a quick and convenient way to shut your kids up for a while. But if you're a thinking adult with an analytical brain, then this movie's mere existence is an insult to you. This movie is Netflix spitting in your face and expecting you to ask for more. That's how little they think of you. That's how stupid they think you are.
Just let me list off some miscellaneous complaints because I don't feel like formatting this video in any particular way, and I've already thought about this movie more than the writers did. This is one of those movies where characters do stupid things just because the plot needs them to. As an example, there's a part where they have a bad guy incapacitated, and he drops his gun, and none of the heroes think to pick it up before he frees himself and starts shooting at them again. The movie is full of egregious product placements. The Planters mascot, Mr. Peanut, is in the movie, and he's not just some one-off character who appears in one scene. He's a major character who ends up becoming critical to the hero's journey. What would they have done if they couldn't get Planters to pay for a chunk of the movie? Would the leader of the robots have been the Michelin Man or the Bies Beaver? And there's a scene where they literally list the items on the Panda Express menu. The book this movie is based on makes a point about the dangers of rampant consumerism. And here's the movie shamelessly shilling products. There are a lot of song covers in the movie, and you would think they would have used the popular music from the early '90s since that's when this movie takes place, but no, they just use whatever. And the song choices make no sense and seem totally random. At one point they play Don't Stop Believing by Journey, which came out in 1981, so you can't even call it '90s nostalgia. And it's during a scene where the robots are marching toward the bad guy's headquarters. And the only reason I could think of for why they chose that song is that it sounds vaguely triumphant, which describes a lot of songs which could have been shoehorned into that scene. The movie is so predictable and so derivative of other things while also failing to understand the art of storytelling beyond just being a series of things happening that it's like an AI wrote it. And I know everyone says that about every movie now, but this movie is so dumb and simplistic and misses the point of its source material so completely that it really does feel like someone just told ChatGPT to write a story about robots and it did so based on training data full of other movies like Terminator, Ready Player 1, and Guardians of the Galaxy.
All right, that's enough. Here's a challenge for my audience: In the comments below, tell me which streaming service you hate the least and why. And don't forget to subscribe. Check my channel for other videos you may have missed since YouTube doesn't always tell you when I upload. Leave a comment, send me your fan art, and support me on Patreon. The links are in the pin comment. Bye. [Music]