Directing duo Anthony and Joe Russo’s latest film, “The Electric State” (2025), continues their recent trend: badly written, poorly acted, astonishingly expensive and not even given a theatrical release.
Since “Avengers: Endgame” (2019), the Russo Brothers have had a very rocky string of releases, including “Cherry” (2021) and “The Gray Man” (2022), both of which received mixed reviews and went directly to streaming. “The Electric State” was made on a whopping budget of nearly $320 million and is loosely based on Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated novel of the same name.
The film follows Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a teenage girl traversing a crumbling United States with a robot in search of her long-lost brother. This premise, while promising in theory, is undermined by shallow character development, derivative story beats and a screenplay that substitutes sentimentality for genuine emotional depth. The inclusion of Keats, a smuggler played by Chris Pratt, serves little more than to inject superficial charm into a story devoid of narrative momentum.
The film was written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the duo who wrote both “Avengers: Endgame” and “Infinity War” (2018). Markus and McFeely attempt to mix the quippy humor of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — or MCU — into the film, but here, it feels entirely out of place.
From a thematic standpoint, the film dips its toes into talking about grief, technological dependence and the erasure of humanity in the face of artificial intelligence. However, these motifs remain underexplored, relegated to background noise amidst action sequences and exposition-heavy dialogue. The emotional beats, particularly those involving Michelle’s relationship with her accompanying robot, feel unearned and mechanically inserted, more in service of a predetermined emotional arc than organic storytelling.
Stylistically, the film draws heavily from the visual grammar of 1980s and 1990s pop culture, echoing films like “E.T.” (1982), “The Iron Giant” (1999) and, more recently, “Stranger Things” (2016), a comparison made all the more conspicuous by Brown’s involvement. Yet, unlike its inspirations, “The Electric State” fails to synthesize nostalgia into meaningful media. No reference or Easter egg means anything because we, the audience, feel absolutely zero connection to the characters or story events.
Moreover, the film suffers from poor pacing. At 125 minutes, “The Electric State” overstays its welcome. The editing lacks rhythm and the tonal inconsistencies — swinging between dystopian gravitas and whimsical road movie — only heighten the sense of disorientation. These tonal inconsistencies can be attributed to the forced, MCU-style dialogue.
Ultimately, “The Electric State” — or more so the Russo Brothers — attempts to blend a post-apocalyptic coming-of-age tale with retro-futurist visual aesthetics, yet manages to fall under the weight of its own conceptual ambition and narrative incoherence. The film is sadly a representation of a troubling trend in contemporary cinema: the prioritization of streaming, visual spectacle and brand-friendly packaging over coherent storytelling and character.
Rating: 1/5
