Avengers: Endgame directors return to Netflix with a robot apocalypse
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
There’s a lot going on in The Electric State, Netflix’s upcoming retro-future sci-fi movie from once-and-future Avengers movies directors Joe and Anthony Russo. Normally in a trailer post, we’d talk about what we’re seeing on the screen (robots. Lots of robots. And a lot of familiar human faces, too.) and leave the official summary for last. But in this case, you may need Netflix’s massive synopsis just to parse out what you’re seeing on the screen, which more or less looks like Alex Garland’s Civil War plus robots, with a dash of Steven Spielberg whimsy. So let’s get to Netflix’s lengthy rundown:
SYNOPSIS | The Electric State is a spectacular adventure from the directors of Avengers: Endgame set in an alternate, retro-futuristic version of the 1990s. Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Enola Holmes, Damsel) stars as Michelle, an orphaned teenager navigating 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, Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World), 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.
That’s a lot to take in, and the trailer itself only communicates a little of it — mostly, the idea of a robot that has something to do with Brown’s brother, and Jurassic World’s and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Chris Pratt navigating yet another apocalypse as yet another snappish dirtbag with a heart of gold. The trailer leans much more into robot chaos, with an Escape From New York-style walled city where all the robots are supposed to live between uprisings, and a lot of field combat featuring a lot of CG.
Does it all feel just a little like the final combat of Avengers: Endgame with a Midnight Special “genius boy / protective family” plot mixed in? Sure. But it might help to know that the story’s based on a graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag, whose robot art inspired the Tales From the Loop franchise, which includes a TV series, tabletop role-playing game, and board game. The melancholy overhanging his work feels like an odd match for the Russos’ action-oriented filmmaking, but the mixed sensibilities here also help explain why this trailer feels like it’s mix-and-matching a dozen different ideas all at once.
The Electric State hits Netflix on March 14.
