March, 2025 - Lights Camera Action

The Electric State was an easy choice

To my own professional shame, I had not heard a peep about The Electric State. I found out about it from the always magnificent Mrs Average Dude. Since we went to see Novacaine on Friday, we found ourselves at home in the Mancave home theater Saturday night and looking for a streaming movie. I have yet to find a Chris Pratt movie that didn’t have something to offer. The Electric State was an easy choice.

The Electric State is an alternate reality retrofuturistic movie where automated sentience evolved in the early 1990s. By the 2000s, a war between robots and humans has been fought, with flesh and blood being the victors. Because of society’s compassion for ‘robotic rights’, the defeated automatons are not disassembled and repurposed, but exiled to a massive walled internment camp in the desert.

I was a little uneasy watching the band, not gonna lie

What makes The Electric State different than Terminator or The Creator is the cartoonish form of the robots. Think about the old Showbiz Pizza animatronics. Or if Five Nights at Freddies were a PG movie. I watched the Showbiz Pizza Rockafire Explosion as a kid. I was fascinated but also had a nightmare or two about them. Seeing Mr Peanut lead a rebellion that reinforced those childhood ‘discomforts’ was special and I loved it.

Trusting the science

The theory behind the title is that consiousness exists in an electric state and creates a bond between people that can exist outside of distance, time or even death. The theory is akin to quantum physics, which theorizes that objects can remain linked after physical contact. I don’t know whether the Electric State theory has any real scientific juice or not. But we’ve been asked for much greater leaps of faith in our escapism, so we’ll suspend any disbelief and go with it.

The Electric State stars Millie Bobbie Brown as Michelle, a ward of the state due to a car accident that that un-alived her mom, dad and tra-genius little brother, Chris. Michelle now lives with her foster father played perfectly but briefly by Jason Alexander. Depressed and lonely, Michelle is visited by a robot avatar of Chris’s favorite childhood cartoon – Cosmo.

Wanting so much to believe that Chris is alive, Michelle and Cosmo embark on an adventure that takes the to the desert of misfit robots. Chris Pratt (playing Keith, an ex-soldier-now smuggler) and his own robot side-kick Herm get tangled up with Michelle and Cosmo in a search for her flesh and blood brother.

Who Knew Mr Peanut was a bad-@$$?

The Electric State was short on story, short on character development, but long on retrofuturistic robotic special effects. Pratt’s Keith was Starlord with Bon Jovi doo. Stanley Tucci was never given enough room to grow. Ke Huy Quan (Short Round, remember) had a brief appearance, Giancarlo Esposito continues his recent run of short, one-dimensional bad guy roles (Captain America 4) and Woody Harrelson shows up as Mr Peanut, the deposed and exiled leader of the robot rebellion.

A case can be made (and I’m one who would make it) is that the least deserving live actor got the most screentime. Bobby Millie Brown as the life-hardened angsty teen (though she looks like she is in her late-twenties) chewed up scene after scene and never felt very relatable. I was more emotionally invested in Herm. And speaking of…

The Real Stars of the show

Even though the ‘star power’ was there, the scene-stealers were definitely the automatons. Sure, there were the usual cold steel battle-bots that we’ve come to expect. But the real attraction – the retrofuturistic robots – were both charming and discomforting at the same time. I was enthralled, looking for more and more of our commercial cultural icons to make an appearance. I honestly expected to see the Michelin Man or Shoney’s Big Boy marauding through cities like the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man. In a movie world where CGI has all but replaced actual story-telling, the special effects here were actually ‘special’.

Well, no wonder!

Having no advance knowledge or The Electric State, I found myself saying throughout the movie ‘this is really Marvel-like’. Starlord, check. Dr. Erskin, check. Short Round, check. Captain Iron-Falcon-man, check. When the credits rolled around, I finally figured it out. Directed by the Russo Brothers. Music by Alan Silvestri. The Electric State was an off-Marvel production. Not a slam but clearly, there is a signature style that the Russos adhere to. And a successful one.

The Average Dude is happy to give The Electric State a solid 3.75 out of 5. If they had added maybe 20 minutes of character dev for Pratt or Tucci, that might have elevated the score. And Millie Bobbi Brown was, in my opinion, a poor choice for Michelle. Jenna Ortega might have been a better choice. Either way, The Electric State is a really decent choice for a Saturday night at home popcorn pusher. Enjoy!
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Ho-lee crap. Mickey 17, wtf was that?

Once again, we see that the Hollywood marketing machine is on point. Anyone who saw the trailers for Mickey 17 were intrigued. We thought we were going to be treated to a futuristic dark comedy. What we got was…well, I’m not really sure WHAT we got.

O Coens, where art thou?

Creating good dark comedy is hard. It may be the hardest kind of movie to make. Mostly they’re a kind of niche that you either get or don’t get. Example: I don’t think my mom and dad would ever be able to appreciate most of the Coen brothers dark work*. They might like a gag or two from Raising Arizona or Big Lebowski or Bad Santa. But some of the more nuanced elements of the Coen brother’s work will escape them. They may laugh at ‘Gimme back mah baby, you warthog from hell’ and totally miss the irony that the baby was stolen to begin with.

I bring up the Coen Brother’s work because there are times when Mickey 17 seemed to channel its inner Fargo. Those times are few and far between, unfortunately. And in total honesty, there are as many times it channels its inner Drive Away Dolls.** Truly polar opposites.

You’ll always be Glen to us

Mickey 17 stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes. Mickey and his business partner Timo (Steven Yeun – Glen from The Walking Dead) are on the run from a small-time loan shark and decide their best course of action is to flee off-world to a cult-like space colony on a snow-bound planet.*** Leading this pilgrimage is TV Evangelist and failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his back-stage controlling wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). It’s all very over-the-top farcical in the same vein as the Coen Brothers work.

Timing is everything

I don’t think I’m overstating things by saying that Mark Ruffalo has a particular political leaning. He’s been very vocal about it over the years. His portrayal of Kenneth Marshall is a very thinly veiled commentary on who he sees as a political adversary. And Ruffalo plays it with utter commitment. In a time when the national sentiment is weighted against that leaning, it casts a shadow over his performance, making it somewhat polarizing. In short, it’s too on the nose. Now, if the part had been given to Mel Gibson? The juxtaposition would be comedy gold.

Kind of like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys

I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Pattinson’s work. Admittedly, I steered clear of anything Twilight related. His small part in Harry Potter was a non-factor and his take on Batman was infuriating (though I don’t necessarily put that on him. I blame the writing). Regardless, I am happy to admit that his portrayal of Mickey 17 was eye-opening. Dude showed a bit of range and I won’t be so dismissive of him going forward.

So, what went wrong?

Mickey 17 seems to be suffering from a complete lack of identity. Is it a dark comedy? Is it a space adventure? Is it a socio/political commentary? Is the message about technology run amok? Mickey 17 touches on all of those but never really commits to any of them, giving us a disjointed movie full of unresolved strings and uneven, inconsistent behaviors. Its all over the place, which is frustrating. And what the heck was that ending about? I still don’t understand wtf that was about. Sigh…

I’m very sorry to say that I was utterly disappointed with Mickey 17 and can only muster a weak-@$$ rating of 2.2 out of 5. Feel free to watch it on streaming. I’m sure it will be there soon. So far, this year, the stuff coming out of Hollywood has been really, really pitiful, like the studios are cleaning out their cinematic junk drawer. I kind of wish I had stayed home and cleaned out my own junk drawer.

*I may be beating a dead warthog with this, but I am on record as saying that the Coen brother (singular) movie **Drive Away Dolls is the WORST movie I’ve ever seen and absolutely taints any desire to see Coen work in the future.

***And lest I forget, Mickey and Timo owe their loan shark a whopping 35k, for which he sends a thug into space to ‘collect’. That’s couch cushion change in a futuristic world, I would imagine. Coen-esqur or just crappy writing? If you can’t tell, it’s the latter.

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