Joe and Anthony Russo, better known as the Russo brothers, have enjoyed two of the most lucrative careers in Hollywood. The bulk of their success comes from the features they’ve co-directed for Marvel: Three of those projects, in which they helped turn comic-book characters into icons and “cinematic universes” into a standard practice, are among the 50 highest-grossing movies of all time. Two of them—Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame—made more than $2 billion at the box office globally. Apart from James Cameron, they’re the only directors to have crossed that milestone at least twice.
Judging by their filmography since Endgame, though, it’s unlikely that the Russos will do so for a third time—at least, not without the Avengers. The astronomical budgets the pair have commanded over the past half decade have not yielded Hulk-size cultural footprints: Netflix, which began green-lighting expensive movies to help build its own franchises, stated that the Russos’ $200 million spy thriller The Gray Man topped its most-watched list for two weeks. But neither the film nor Ryan Gosling’s assassin protagonist has lingered in the public memory. Citadel, the Prime Video series the Russos produced, is one of the priciest shows ever made, at more than $300 million for its first season. Conceived by an Amazon executive, Citadel was meant to kick-start a “global franchise,” but it barely made an impression with viewers; in its first month of availability, the show never entered Nielsen’s Top 10 streaming rankings. Without Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Russos’ work has become formulaic and ephemeral. Ambitious studios, it seems, can’t simply buy their way into the zeitgeist.
Yet here the Russos are again, with another exorbitant attempt to establish a new blockbuster series. The Electric State, now on Netflix, is a $320 million adaptation of Simon Stalenhåg’s graphic novel about a girl who, joined by an intelligent robot, searches for her brother across a retro-futuristic, dystopian America. Some of that money has evidently been put to good use: The visual effects are seamless, the robot designs are genuinely cool, and the set dressing is meticulous. The cast, too, is stacked: Holly Hunter, Colman Domingo, and Brian Cox pop up. Their roles, though, are so absurdly small that they suggest heavy reshoots and excised footage.
Hollywood studios granting massive funds to directors who have made box-office hits is a common practice—especially for projects that appear likely to return on the investment. But the Russos have become unusually adept at demonstrating the creative limitations of those piles of cash. Companies have made clear their desire to generate fresh cinematic universes, and Stalenhåg’s book is an excellent starting point for an expansive film adaptation: His evocative artwork explores lands that practically beg to be rendered on the big screen, and his heroine’s quest is filled with pathos. Anthony Russo himself said, during a panel at New York Comic Con last October, that he and his brother were excited “to figure out what kind of story we can tell in this world.”
The story they tell, however, replaces the originality of Stalenhåg’s book with algorithm-friendly, inelegant slop. The Russos reduce the graphic novel’s haunting and macabre tale down to a clichéd battle between unethical humans and sentient machines, in which the latter tried to assert their rights and lost; it’s a generic good-versus-evil setup not unlike those found in The Gray Man and Citadel. Millie Bobby Brown—the closest thing Netflix has to an in-house star—plays Michelle, a teenager sympathetic to the automatons’ plight who rallies a group of misfits to dethrone a heartless tech mogul, Ethan (Stanley Tucci), who believes that humans and robots shouldn’t coexist. Ethan wants to give people the edge by hooking them up to the virtual-reality headsets he invented; Michelle would like everyone to log off and touch some grass.
What Michelle and Ethan do have in common is that they’re both one-dimensional archetypes with tragic backstories. The film around them is equally bland. The Electric State is so transparently eager to satisfy as many demographics of viewers as possible that it proves its own message: that a world dependent on business interests and technological optimization dulls artistic potential and human ingenuity. All that’s left is a wasteland of half-baked ideas searching for a home.
There’s a self-conscious streak to The Electric State that renders it inert from the start. The Russos populate the cast with big names (and Marvel standbys) such as Chris Pratt and Anthony Mackie, actors whose chemistry with each other almost distracts from the weak storytelling. Michelle resembles the protagonists of 2010s young-adult films, complete with pithy lines (“I have a condition where I can only live in reality,” she scoffs) and a signature hairdo. Each character is meant to be easy to root for or against, which forces them to be simplistic; Michelle’s ally Keats, lazily played by Pratt, is so underwritten that I’m surprised he even has a name. And many of the robots, despite how lifelike they look, have boring personalities. Woody Harrelson voices the Planters mascot, Mr. Peanut—further proof of the budget going toward procuring recognizable imagery—but the generic role stifles the actor’s eccentric charm.
As I watched The Electric State, I was reminded of other projects, good and bad: the philosophical musings of Blade Runner, the flashy incoherence of the Divergent films, the character design from the terrific horror video game Soma. The Russos were obviously influenced by Steven Spielberg’s output in particular, but what they’ve achieved is more akin to the much-maligned, reference-ridden Ready Player One than E.T. The directors had the money and incentive to strip popular works for parts—mimicking previous successes seems like a safe bet for attaining the widest possible appeal and the highest number of viewing minutes, the metric by which many streaming platforms assess how well their projects perform. But such choices leave the movie feeling too familiar, and it’s unable to build an identity of its own. Every intricately devised robot, every “Hey, it’s that guy!” actor, every closely replicated image from Stalenhåg’s graphic novel becomes nothing but window dressing.
Of course, even the most acclaimed filmmakers can fall victim to the constraints of corporate expectations. Barry Jenkins’s best efforts to enliven the Lion King prequel, Mufasa, couldn’t prevent it from feeling like a capital-p Product. Jenkins’s fellow Oscar winner Chloe Zhao similarly struggled to set Eternals apart from the rest of Marvel’s green-screen-heavy fare. The Russo brothers, meanwhile, are known for their past accomplishments with transforming movies into merchandising opportunities. But their latest entry into this costly genre is yet another embarrassment in a string of them, and similarly destined to be forgotten. The Electric State, with its predictable final shot teeing up a sequel, argues for a society that values togetherness and imagination. Yet the movie—under the guidance of its directors and producers—just can’t be bothered to do any of that imagining itself.
