The Electric State — big budget wonder, small sparks: a movie blog.
The Russo brothers’ The Electric State landed on Netflix in March 2025 with more buzz than comfort: a massive reported budget, a glossy aesthetic pulled from Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated book, and a cast stacked with names (Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander, and more). What the film promised — a melancholic, retro-futuristic road trip through an alternate 1990s where mascots and robots litter the landscape — and what most viewers actually got, though, turned out to be two surprisingly different things. Below: who’s in it, who it’s about, how it “performed,” what niche it tries to occupy, and a deep dive into why this huge, expensive-looking movie divided people so thoroughly.
Quick facts
Title: The Electric State (2025)
Directors / Producers: Anthony & Joe Russo.
Screenplay: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely.
Based on: Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 illustrated novel.
Principal cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan (dual role), Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie (voice), Brian Cox (voice), Jenny Slate (voice), Giancarlo Esposito, Stanley Tucci, Jason Alexander.
Runtime: ~128 minutes. Reported budget: ~$320 million (one of the priciest Netflix productions ever).
Netflix release: March 14, 2025 (after a Feb 24 premiere). The movie reportedly amassed 25.2 million views in its first three days on Netflix.
How many cast members — and who are the principals?
If you count every named performer with a meaningful credit, the film lists around 20–25 principal and supporting actors — not counting dozens of voice cameos and motion-capture performers for robots. The marquee human names:
- Millie Bobby Brown — Michelle (the teenage protagonist).
- Chris Pratt — Keats (smuggler/drifter who becomes her companion).
- Ke Huy Quan — plays a dual role (one human, one animatronic / robot voice performance).
- Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander, Jenny Slate, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, V.O. cameos and others populate human and robot roles.
That is a lot of star wattage to hang on an arthouseish road-movie concept — and Netflix didn’t skimp on supporting talent or voice acting. The sheer volume of credited performers (plus heavy VFX/puppetry crews) underscores how much production energy went into building the film’s world.
Who is the “means character”? (the film’s emotional center).
The film is anchored on Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown): an orphaned teenager who sets off across a ruined, retro-tech United States with a sweet — and strangely sentient — robot named Cosmo. Her goal: to track down her presumed-dead little brother, Christopher. Along the way she meets Keats (Chris Pratt), a smuggler with his own baggage, and a roster of human and machine oddities. Michelle’s curiosity, loneliness, and stubborn belief in finding family supply the film’s emotional motor; the many supporting set pieces fold in around her pilgrimage.
Box “collection” and streaming performance.
This is a Netflix movie, so it doesn’t have a traditional theatrical box-office tally to measure success. Instead:
- Netflix reported a huge opening in viewership terms — 25.2 million views in the first three days — and the film was one of the platform’s most-watched releases during its launch window. That is impressive scale, even if Netflix’s definition of a “view” can differ from theatrical metrics.
- Critical and audience reception, however, was mixed to negative: Metacritic aggregated a generally unfavorable critical reception (low Metascore), and Rotten Tomatoes reflected a steep critical drop as well. Many reviewers praised the visuals but criticized the screenplay and adaptation choices — a contrast between spectacle and emotional cohesion.
So: commercially (by Netflix’s platform metrics) it registered big numbers; culturally it became more of a lightning rod — widely watched and widely disparaged by critics who expected a more faithful or nuanced translation of Stålenhag’s melancholy artbook.
The Electric State film niche.
The Electric State tries to sit at the intersection of three marketplaces:
- Illustrated-book / indie-SF adaptation — carrying the melancholic, weird-tech aesthetic of Simon Stålenhag’s work.
- Blockbuster streaming spectacle — high VFX, large set pieces, and star casting (a Russo-level production).
- Road-movie / coming-of-age fantasy — a young protagonist searching for family and meaning across a desolate, uncanny landscape.
That’s an ambitious niche: it’s neither pure auteur art film nor pure popcorn spectacle, and that in-between identity became one of the film’s biggest liabilities. The source material’s quiet melancholy felt at odds with the Russos’ tendency toward big emotional beats and crowd-pleasing clarity, which some critics and fans found discordant.
Deep dive: story, tone, craft, and why the film split people.
1) Story & structure — a road trip in chrome and neon
At its core the movie is simple: Michelle believes her brother is alive. She teams with Cosmo (a robot with charm and pathos) and Keats (the reluctant adult guide). The story unfolds as episodic encounters across a dystopian Americana — vacant malls, rusting robots, abandoned theme-park mascots, and corporate ruins. These vignettes are often beautiful on the eye and emotionally suggestive on paper, but the movie transforms them into a more conventional narrative that demands clear answers and big gestures. That tonal shift is where many viewers felt the film lost the subtlety of the book.
2) Visual craft — this is undeniably a looker
If there’s one thing almost everyone agreed on, it’s that Electric State is gorgeously rendered. The film leans into Stålenhag’s retro-futurist visuals: toy-like giants, flattened 1990s branding twisted into menace, and a palette that alternates syrupy sunsets with sickly neon. The VFX and production design are lavish, and the movie frequently pays off purely as sensory entertainment. In that sense, the Russos delivered — it’s an A-list visual world.
3) Performances — committed, but sometimes miscast for the material
Millie Bobby Brown gives Michelle a lean, expressive center; Chris Pratt provides comic warmth and smuggler charm; Ke Huy Quan offers surprising emotional depth. The veteran supporting players (Tucci, Harrelson, Giancarlo Esposito, etc.) bring texture. The problem critics raised wasn’t the acting so much as the context: gifted actors perform beats written to be broad or expository, and the result often feels like actors trying to rescue a script that wants to be two movies at once.
4) Adaptation choices — looser, louder, and more literal
Simon Stålenhag’s book is elliptical, melancholy, and dreamy — it’s more mood-board than linear narrative. The Russos and their writers chose to anchor the story around a conventional hero’s quest and to add explanatory threads that the book intentionally leaves ambiguous. Critics from The New York Times and Variety accused the film of flattening ambiguities into obviousness and of bolting on a “generic” showdown between humans and robots rather than preserving the book’s quiet wonder. For readers of the original, that felt like a betrayal; for casual viewers it read like a sometimes hollow blockbuster.
5) Themes — the film wanted to ask big questions, but didn’t always trust the audience
Beneath the dust and circuitry are themes about displacement, corporate erasure, the end of simple consumer joy, and a child’s search for family. The film tries to wedge in commentary about prejudice (robots as exiles), grief, and the commodification of nostalgia. But critics argued these themes were handled too didactically — shouted from the loudspeaker rather than discovered. That undercut the emotional resonance the quieter source material achieves by implication.
6) Critical reception vs. audience engagement — a noisy disconnect
Metacritic’s critical consensus leaned negative; Rotten Tomatoes and many major outlets gave it poor marks for tone and screenplay even as they praised its look and some performances. Yet the film’s opening viewership numbers show that Netflix’s algorithm and marketing got people to click play. The cultural impression is therefore twofold: it’s widely watched and widely panned, which in 2025’s streaming economy can still be financially “successful” for a platform that values subscriber engagement as much as prestige.
Final thoughts of The Electric State Movie.
If you’re a fan of Simon Stålenhag’s art and you want a faithful transposition of mood and mystery, be warned: this isn’t the book on screen. If you want a lavishly produced, big-cast sci-fi road movie with striking imagery and a kid-and-robot heart — and you’re willing to overlook script problems and tonal compromises — you’ll find moments of real pleasure here. The film’s visual inventiveness and Millie Bobby Brown’s committed lead performance make it watchable; the Russo brothers’ appetite for spectacle gives it weight; but the loose adaptation choices and heavy-handed messaging make it frustrating for viewers who wanted to lose themselves in the book’s melancholy rather than be led by the nose.
Put another way: The Electric State is a lavish, often lovely film with a disconnect at its core — between the quiet artbook it sprang from and the crowd-pleasing mechanics it ultimately chooses. It’s a movie that looks like a $320 million dream but sometimes feels like a $320 million compromise. Whether that bothers you will determine if you leave feeling dazzled or disappointed.
