The Electric State (2025) - If Surrogates, Ready Player One, and Avatar had a Threesome

This one got lambasted by critics and viewers alike, so I wasn't sure I should even watch it. Add to the fact I think 90% of Netflix movies are utterly mediocre and forgettable, and I really wasn't sure it was worth the effort.

This one was actually worth a watch, but I'm not sure I'm going to remember anything. Way to go Netflix? We're halfway there.

In an alternate Earth, robots have been around for decades doing all our crap jobs. By the 19990s (don't ask, it's not explained), humans and robots go to war over 'robot rights.' Robots are winning until a company called Centre finds a way for humans to use avatars to fight them. Robots lose and agree to be banned to a walled-off area of the US Southwest. The world is now basically living in some virtual reality with VR goggles on, which we never even see, while the real world decays around them.

So anyway, some girl's wicked-smart brother dies in a car accident and suddenly appears at her door four years later, but he's there virtually inside some robot. She and Chris Pratt meet and are on the run from Centre, who wants the brother back. They end up in the banished robot wasteland and try to figure out why Centre took him, and how to find the brother's body and free him all in one.

This is a hard movie to pin down. It's fun, but not a blast. It's an intriguing premise but doesn't end up going anywhere. There might have been a message (or three)  in here, but it gets bogged down. It had an interesting premise, but it takes such little time with world-building for you to absorb the world the characters are running around in. It looks great, but they utilize very barren areas so it just seems overly desolate and bland.

Pratt, Millie, and the rest of the cast are fine, knowing they are in another 'blockbuster' Netflix movie and putting just enough effort in to make the movie work. This is directed by the Russo Brothers, who crushed it in four Marvel movies and haven't done anything to match that since. It definitely feels like they spent a lot of money on this, but the end product feels like they should have spent more on the script and less on rendering CGI effectively.  There are a lot of things that don't make sense, a lot of "how did they get from A to B so fast?" questions and a lot of characters doing things in a forced way instead of natural. 

A random stranger's opinion - There are a lot of problems with the movie, but if you go in just wanting to be entertained with sentient robots that look like Mr. Peanut and Pratt looking like Bodhi from Point Break, it's a decent enough way to spend two hours.

Grade: C