Dystopian action sci-fi that comes across as... dystopian

Millie Bobby Brown puts down her phone and worships at the altar of consumerism in soulless 'The Electric State'. Plus horror 'Opus' offers no revelations, says Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

The Electric State contains the most baffling call-to-arms in recent cinema. This is a story, in short, about how all those damn kids should put their phones down and go hug the nearest corporate mascot. That’s not a surprising take to see from Anthony and Joe Russo, the director duo behind the secondhighest-grossing film of all time, Avengers: Endgame, produced for the empire of Mickey Mouse. Still, it’s an interminable one to have to sit through.

The Russos, for Netflix and with the help of Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have stripped away the melancholy that underpinned The Electric State’s source material – a 2018 graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag that reflected on humanity’s intertwined relationship with technology. Instead, its alternative history of west coast America in the Nineties has been mined for self-satisfied nostalgia.

The film’s teen orphan protagonist Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) directly implores the audience that life “can only happen out there, in the real world”, having just spent an entire film bonding with a CGI-rendered robot called Cosmo (Alan Tudyk) whose painted perma-grin, the film dutifully explains, can be traced back to Walt Disney himself. It’s a movie supposedly about the tactile and the material, but in which the vast majority of characters are collections of pixels, inhabiting the same flat, grey landscape of modern franchise affairs.

And, my god, does