The art of cinema is meant to evoke emotions from all across the spectrum, but we have to admit that we never actually saw this coming….

The Electric State which is coming to Netflix this Friday is one of the most lazy, emotionally moribund pieces of entertainment to ever be put on a screen.  And to be clear, we’re not mad at it, we’re EMBARSSED for it and everyone involved in it.

It only bears as passing resemblance to the frame work of a movie and is just a collection of glossy set pieces that try to force in an emotion swell when the paint by numbers text book that the movie got made with tells them to.

Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), an orphaned teenager, navigates life in a society where sentient robots resembling cartoons and mascots, who once served peacefully among humans, now live in exile following a failed uprising. Everything Michelle thinks she knows about the world is upended one night when she’s visited by Cosmo, a sweet, mysterious robot who appears to be controlled by Christopher — Michelle’s genius younger brother whom she thought was dead. Determined to find the beloved sibling she thought she had lost, Michelle sets out across the American southwest with Cosmo, and soon finds herself reluctantly joining forces with Keats (Chris Pratt), a low-rent smuggler, and his wisecracking robot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). As they venture into the Exclusion Zone, a walled-off corner in the desert where robots now exist on their own, Keats and Michelle find a strange, colorful group of new animatronic allies — and begin to learn that the forces behind Christopher’s disappearance are more sinister than they ever expected.

Given the pedigree of all involved, it’s hard to believe that something this soulless could actually get produced, but this is exactly that.

With its poor and predictable story structure, underwritten characters and generally miscast ensemble there just isn’t a lot to grab on to here but with that I have to live by the old adage that my mother taught me in that “If you can’t say anything nice about someone or something don’t say anything at all”….so here we go.

From a visual effects and production design standpoint, The Electric State actually looks pretty good and its money well spent that helps us get into the production design of this alternative world that they are building.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

We actually can’t lay all this at the feet of the directing duo of the Russo Brothers because so much of this film’s inescapable problems come in its writing.  Adapting the book by Simon Stalenhag can’t have been easy since it’s actually more of a graphic novel only coming in around the length of many screenplays and while credited screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely so have a solid pedigree with all the work they’ve done with the Russo’s in the MCU, the script may actually be one the first to at least feel like it was written by artificial intelligence.

The narrative basically boils down to a serious of action set pieces combined with buffer moments of generic dialogue that actually forget to get us invested in what’s going on.  It’s all inherently silly but also takes itself far too seriously never allowing for anything genuinely organic from an emotional stand point to happen.  Rather the film just tells us when to feel something by shoehorning in musical swells and overly wrought montage pieces that are supposed to make us feel something simply based on the song that it swells up with rather than giving us a reason to care about the characters.

A little bit of character and narrative exposition to actually flesh out a reason why we should care about anything that happens in the movie would have gone a long, LONG way.

The usually stalwart Millie Bobby Brown who is Netflix’s franchise actor with both the Enola Holmes and the series Stranger Things falters here because the part is actually written younger than we are used to seeing her portray.  We’re used to seeing her as some what of a bad ass young woman coming into her own here, and while you can tell it’s where the narrative wants this all to go, the script lets her down as she kind of fades into the ether of it all, and considering that she’s the lead it’s probably not a good thing.

Chris Pratt is the generically goofy action hero that he does in his sleep (and his on screen chemistry with Millie Bobby Brown was minimal at BEST), Stanley Tucci is too charming to play a super villain even on his worst days while gifted character actors like Giancarlo Esposito, and Colman Domingo don’t get much of anything.  The bulk of the voice cast is wasted and for some reason Holly Hunter and Jason Alexander are in the movie…because?

What’s ultimately so frustrating about The Electric State is that is is mimicking so many beats and set pieces from a myriad of other films (Star Wars, Back To The Future to name just a few) that it is actually devoid of both originality and any reason for us to care while were watching it.  It’s a playlist of other movies that got shuffled into this new deck of a film, and it’s not pretty.

Sadly, there are people out there who will enjoy The Electric State because there’s enough that people will ‘recognize’ as a movie and it makes me sad for the state of storytelling and filmmaking because if this movie counts as anything remotely resembling what a movie should be and how a story should be told then we aren’t doing our jobs.

The Electric State doesn’t deserve to be called an actual film and the reality that more people will see this then the bulk of the Academy Award films that were nominated this year just makes me upset.

The Russo Brothers have done better, the actors and writers have done better…even Netflix has done better.   Just send a message and don’t put this on your ‘My List’ when you fire up Netflix this weekend.  Watch WWE on Netflix instead, they actually tell stories that make sense compared to this.