Sibling filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo (“Avengers: Endgame”) are at it again with their upcoming film “The Electric State.” Starring Millie Bobby Brown (“Stranger Things”) and Chris Pratt (“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”) the film is a look into a desolate future… except that it takes place in 1994…
“The Electric State,” takes place in the aftermath of a battle between humanity and artificial intelligence that ended in a devastating stalemate. Human casualties were buried, while the husks of the automatons they fought rust where they fell. With all surviving robots exclied to the “exclusion zone” in the southwestern desert. All while humans try to rebuild society without the aid of technology.
“You can recognize humanity in technology, and you can recognize inhumanity in humans,” Anthony Russo told Vanity Fair. “Both things are possible. That’s the struggle.”
The Plot
In the movie, Michelle (Brown) is a young woman searching for her lost brother who she thought passed away. That is, until he finds her through a remote-controlled robot that looks like a life-sized tin-toy version of his favorite sci-fi hero, Kid Cosmo. Even though the robot can only speak in catchphrases, it attempts to lead her to him. And since humans can pact-bond with anything, Michelle begins to see the soul of her brother in the toy.
Along the way they are joined by Keats (Pratt), a veteran turned long haul trucker. As he works a smuggling operation with a construction machine named Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), this former enemy works like a Russian nesting doll, hopping into increasingly larger or smaller versions of himself. The pair are the only ones who can help Michelle venture through hostile territory and track down her missing brother.
“The texture in the images was really powerful, and it felt like a story about broken families and broken people trying to find each other in a broken world,” said Joe. “It also felt resonant to us, raising our kids in a technology-heavy world.”
But Wait, There’s More
If that plot doesn’t sound dense enough, the explanation for the robot uprising is also an alt-history for Walt Disney’s early animatronics. “The Electric State,” has some of Disneyland’s early innovations take a wildly advanced turn. This leads to the development of robots intelligent enough to rebel against their creators a few decades later.
“These robots had the most benign appearance possible, and they end up feeling that they’re being mistreated and have a desire to be treated as equals with humans, which leads to a war,” Joe explains. “And now you have this strange dichotomy playing out where these very pleasing and palatable service bots are now trying to kill you.”
Why 1994?
“It could be an assaultive theme if the story were set in the present day,” explains Joe. “Sometimes we find that when you couch it in a fable, and you remove it from its immediacy, you can create space for people to process it differently. What Simon Stalenhag did that was so clever is that humans are using technology to dehumanize themselves, and he tells a story about technology that aspires to become human. At what point do they cross, and at what point does the technology become more human than the humans?”
“The intent was to create complex feelings for you, where it’s both funny and tragic at the same time,” Joe adds. “The mythology behind the film is that robots were created in this world to be pleasing to the eye, to feel non-threatening, to make you love them. To make you smile, to sell you things, to take care of you. So they have a cartoonish aspect to them by design in the movie.”
“The Electric State” is expected to hit Netflix in early 2025.
