There’s something profoundly unsettling about the way we imagine the past — or more precisely, how we reinvent it to fill gaps that reality never allowed us to occupy. Instead of portraying the 1990s as they actually were, “The Electric State” commits to crafting an alternate specter of that decade, where technological revolution advanced with violent speed and reshaped the emotional, social, and cultural fabric of humanity. In this distorted landscape, the road becomes the last refuge for those seeking meaning in a world already defeated by its own creations. Michelle’s journey, accompanied by a mute and ever-present robot, serves as the narrative spine — but her crossing is, above all, a gesture of resistance amid the silent collapse of a country that no longer knows whom it serves — or why it exists.
In adapting Simon Stålenhag’s visual work, the Russo brothers choose a less contemplative path than the one seen in Tales from the Loop, leaning instead into a format that flirts with spectacle. But rather than simply updating the aesthetic of 1990s adventure films, they distort it — as though we were watching the memory of a movie that was never made, but which everyone somehow swears they’ve seen. This nostalgic appropriation — deliberately artificial — serves a more subversive purpose: to reveal the emotional hollowing of contemporary narratives, which are packaged for clicks rather than catharsis. The beauty of the project lies precisely in its dissonance — in its ability to feel familiar and yet deeply wrong.
Visually, the film is a meticulously crafted collage of technological ruins: faded billboards, colossal towers buried in dust, and machines that seem to hold, in their silences, the echoes of a lost humanity. There is poetry, yes — but it’s constantly crushed by a direction that favors relentless motion. The film’s potential lyricism is interrupted by stylized combat scenes, clipped dialogue, and an editing rhythm that feels calibrated to avoid any real pause. Rather than getting lost in the vastness of this world, we’re dragged through it — without time to absorb its wounds.
Characters operate less as individuals and more as avatars of recycled archetypes. Chris Pratt plays a functional caricature of the adventure hero — more concerned with evoking the past than generating any genuine disruption in the present. His smuggler is efficient, but predictable. Stanley Tucci, on the other hand, delivers a corporate villain of unexpected depth — not because he’s original, but because he’s disturbingly plausible. His Ethan Skate doesn’t represent the future: he embodies a distorted present, where tech magnates dictate the rules of the game with plastic smiles and a logic of profit masquerading as civilizational mission. Millie Bobby Brown carries the dramatic thread with restraint, but the film’s true emotional tension lives in her interactions with artificial intelligences.
“The Electric State” raises — but ultimately doesn’t sustain — a provocative question: at what point does technological creation begin to assert autonomous subjectivity? When does artificial intelligence stop being code and become presence? These questions are there — visible, unsettling — but relegated to the subtext. The screenplay wavers between embracing philosophical provocation and feeding the hunger for fast-paced entertainment. By prioritizing the latter, it relinquishes the existential dive that could have transformed this story into something greater than the sum of its parts. In a world where algorithms shape not only choices but emotions, the refusal to fully explore this tension feels like a strategic omission — perhaps even a symptomatic one.
The soundtrack encapsulates this contradiction with eerie precision. Alan Silvestri builds a soundscape that blends the sacred with the disposable, the ancient with the synthetic. His reimagining of “Wonderwall” as an ethereal ballad doesn’t just reinterpret a generational anthem — it lays bare nostalgia as a consumable artifact. The melody transports us to a past that never existed but whose absence we feel with startling clarity. And it’s in that dissonance — in this memory built from disjointed fragments — that the film finds its most provocative moment. It doesn’t aim to recall what was, but rather to fabricate recollections of what never came to be.
Yet the film also bears the weight of its own ambition. In trying to balance visual grandeur with conceptual density, it becomes entangled in an industry that rewards predictability. At times, its aesthetic unease threatens to crack open into revelation — but that potential is quickly suppressed by the machinery of high-speed storytelling. Narrative detours, though welcome, fail to break free from the coded structure that governs much of today’s mainstream cinema. The film flirts with rupture, only to return to the mold — as if recognizing that, to exist, it must submit to the system.
Still, there are glimmers of subversion. The refusal to turn the narrative into a linear, algorithm-approved product is, in itself, a meaningful gesture. In a creative ecosystem where every curve seems designed by AI, the act of building a universe with room for unpredictability already feels radical. The film seems to understand that its strength lies not in coherence, but in friction: between past and future, between the human and the programmed, between what we remember and what we invent to keep forgetting.
In the end, this is not a story about a dystopian future. It is a distorted mirror that reflects — with melancholy and force — the identity crisis of an era that no longer distinguishes between memory and simulation. Here, science fiction doesn’t seek to predict what’s coming — but to confront the emptiness of what we’ve already left behind. And perhaps it’s precisely in this emotional forgery, built with surgical precision, that the film finds its reason for being: not as testimony to the future, but as an invented vestige of a past we’re still trying to understand.
Film: The Electric Stage
Director: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
Year: 2025
Genres: Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi
Rating: 7/10