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What is The Electric State about?
Netflix’s 2025 film is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and based on Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 graphic novel. Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, who travels with a robot companion in search of her brother in a retro-futuristic alternate United States after a human-robot war. The world includes a fictional, 200-square-mile exclusion zone where defeated robots have been sent, according to Netflix’s film background article.
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Netflix lists the movie as a 2-hour-8-minute, PG-13 release. The Associated Press review reports a 128-minute runtime and says the rating reflects sci-fi violence and action, language, and some thematic material. Netflix availability can vary by territory and over time.
What message is the film trying to convey?
Director Joe Russo framed the point as a warning about using technology to disconnect from other people. “If there’s any message in the film, it’s to stay connected to the people around you,” he told Netflix Tudum. He also described technology as having major benefits as well as harms, including addiction and weaker communication.
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That gives the movie a clear standard to meet: its adventure needs to make human relationships feel vivid and consequential, not merely state that connection matters. The argument that it fails that test rests on how several reviewers assessed its storytelling, rather than on the director’s intention alone.
Why do some critics say the film’s execution weakens its message?
The spectacle does not guarantee emotional weight
In The Guardian, Wendy Ide praised the special effects but described the storytelling as soulless and emotionally inert. Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the film for The Guardian, called it bland, derivative, and muddled, and argued that it loses the source book’s thoughtful human complexity.
Rank #2
The Associated Press’s Lindsey Bahr likewise praised the robot designs while finding the action repetitive and the film short of a distinctive spark. These reviews support a specific criticism: when a movie about connection feels emotionally distant, its scale can make the gap between theme and experience more noticeable.
Visual craft is a separate strength
The negative assessments were not dismissals of every part of the production. Ide singled out the effects, while Bahr highlighted the robot designs. Netflix’s production feature says the robots were designed with distinct functions and personalities, drawing on recognizable retro-futurist forms, and that human motion-capture performers helped bring them to life. The visual imagination can succeed even if a viewer finds the character work or thematic delivery less persuasive.
How does the adaptation compare with Stålenhag’s book?
Netflix describes the film as changing the graphic novel’s genre while preserving and expanding a family-centered emotional core. Stålenhag endorsed that direction in a Netflix Tudum interview: “What resonated most with me was the emotional core of the movie, which is the need for family. Even though the movie has changed genre from the book a bit, that main core is still the same and has been expanded on beautifully.” He also said the filmmakers asked him about the timeline and backstory but that the film was their work, and that he was “so positively surprised by the end result.”
That approval complicates, rather than cancels, Bradshaw’s criticism that the adaptation drains the book’s human complexity. Stålenhag valued the film’s family focus and accepted it as an independent adaptation; Bradshaw judged that its choices lost nuance. The disagreement turns on what matters most: a family-centered through-line that survives a genre shift, or the subtler human complexity a critic felt the new adventure left behind.
Rank #4
Is calling it a “shockingly bad” movie fair?
It is fair as an opinion about the gap between the film’s intended theme and the experience critics described. It would be too broad as a claim that the movie has no merits or that every viewer will find it unsuccessful. The Guardian and AP reviews cited here are selected professional assessments, not a complete measure of critical opinion or audience response. Their shared reservations about emotional force and repetitive action support the essay’s case; their praise for effects and robot design shows why the verdict need not be all-or-nothing.
One Guardian review reported a $320 million figure, but that figure is not independently established here as a verified production budget. It should not be treated as a confirmed cost or used as proof of the film’s failure.
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