The Electric State is the latest Netflix dud

What would you do with $320 million dollars?

In modern-day terms, that’s nearly the amount that America parted way with to conduct the Louisiana Purchase with France in 1803, a Saudi Arabian football club would need that much to buy Mo Salah from Liverpool or it could pay for 1.2% of the Metrolink based on current estimates.

If you’re Netflix, you spend that same amount of money on The Electric State, an insult to the bottom of the barrel.

Netflix’s reputation is back in the black thanks to the smash success of Adolescence, a series which they poached from Amazon Prime Video.

Adolescence has garnered major critical acclaim for its uncompromising exploration of incel culture and its innovative cinematography which rips up the rulebook of what can be done in television.

The Electric State, meanwhile, is a perfect encapsulation of what Netflix does wrong with films.

The underdog story of Anora winning five Oscars on a shoestring budget makes Netflix spending like the Lehman Brothers in 2007 look even more ridiculous.

Netflix has spent a cumulative total of $1 billion on action films like The Gray Man, Red Notice, 6 Underground, The Adam Project and now, The Electric State in a bid to bring the cinema home.

In the case of all those films, you would be asking for a refund if you paid cinema prices.

Trying to review The Electric State is a moot point; it’s easier to turn this into a broader view of what Netflix gets wrong with its big-budget films and attempts to put the multiplex in your living room.

Netflix has spent big before; they gave Martin Scorsese $200 million to make The Irishman in 2019 and gave Noah Baumbach $100 million in 2022 to direct the unadaptable White Noise.

In those cases, those films were Netflix spending big on auteurs.

We throw the term “auteur” around a lot in reviews, and for those who don’t use Letterboxd or were never cornered by an annoying film student at house parties in college, an auteur refers to a director who has a high level of creative control over a project and makes their films easily identifiable.

For a frame of reference, the dearly departed David Lynch could be identified as an auteur because of his singular, weird vision for his projects.

So with that established, do the Russo Brothers, the guys who made Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame count as auteurs?

That would be a bit like saying that Kilkenny have a good shot at winning the Sam Maguire this year.

It’s delusional at best, and misinformation at worst, yet Netflix have doubled down on treating the Russos as their Eric Cantona in the fight against the Hollywood establishment.

We’ll save you two hours; they aren’t. 

The problem with the Russos, and this extends to Netflix’s own Stranger Things, is trying to replicate the Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron feel without actually managing to find the vein.

The Electric State, based on a 2018 book, is set in the 1990s which gives the Russos the chance to play expensive music and riff on Terminator 2.

Millie Bobby Brown stars as a teenager who is living in a world fresh from a robot-human war, which the humans won after technology was developed which allowed humans to win.

The technology allows people to upload their minds into the robots which creates an interesting Wall-E style world where humans, in theory, can have their minds live forever in the body of a drone while their flesh and blood body wastes away.

This interesting set-up is then jettisoned so Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt can have hijinks with funny robots.

In as many weeks, we are reviewing a film with a good Twilight Zone-y premise and it totally fails to make the most out of it.

However, there is a crucial difference between a film like this and Mickey 17.

Mickey 17, as flawed as it is, is definitely a film made by Bong-Joon Ho, warts and all. There are creative decisions, however good or bad, being made by someone with a vision.

The Electric State has none of that, it’s a typical big-budget Netflix film insofar as you instantly forget what happened the minute the credits roll and is rejected by your brain to make room for more rock music trivia.

When you hear a film costs over $300 million you’d expect there to be some wow and pizzazz – after all, David Lean made Lawrence Of Arabia for less than half of that all the way back in 1963 and Christopher Nolan managed to make a film like Oppenheimer for about 200 million all-in.

Netflix spends money on films the same way Manchester United spends on players – style over substance.

Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt are who you cast in a movie because ChatGPT told you to, some well-paid marketing consultant (or as we suspect, AI) told Netflix those stars could plug the film to their social media followers with their massive combined reach, but at no stage did an actual human being who has seen a movie step in and say “stop.”

In the weeks after David Lynch passed, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos said he was working with Lynch about the possibility of funding a new project from him, but it was scuppered by the pandemic.

The Russo Brothers getting that much money from Netflix feels like we, as a culture, are the victims of a cruel cosmic joke.