REVIEW: The Electric State

It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown.

In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with.

This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. This just a movie that wants to impart a lot. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in for historically marginalized groups. I'll have to leave that metaphor for someone else to unpack.

What stood out to most to this reviewer was how many moments you feel like this movie easily could have been an animated flick, even though the choice to drag all that cartoonery into live-action feels deliberate. Most other outings, I'd be quick to blame it all on the animation stigma, but the connection doesn't feel incidental here.

It should be noted that the movie more or less tells us that these robots basically broke out of Disneyland. (This film literally becomes an AU fanfic of Walt Disney.) This is supposed to account for their Saturday Morning design of the machines and also springboard the film's discussion on nostalgia in the wake of war and devastation. Hence, our central robot is literally a cartoon character--a vestige of childhood willed into 3-dimensions during a time of distress in the life of our protagonist.

This vibe is obviously very motivated, and you do get used to the aesthetics of it all after a while. Even in the apocalypse, humanity will always be drawn to reassuring images of childhood, a theorem that has been proven many times over in the world offscreen. And this winds up being the most interesting thing about the movie, no doubt the thing that made the vested parties want to sign up for the project, such that they were willing to overlook the screenplay's gaps.

I ought to start by conceding that the film designs a fun puzzle, and parts of it work really well. Michelle has to decipher her brother's message using only pantomime and the limited use of pre-recorded catch phrases. And there is surprisingly satisfying bit of set-up and pay-off that has something to do with a Big Mouth Billy Bass. No, really. Those motion-activated singing fish robots actually serve a point.

The human logic, on the other hand, takes a few leaps. The entire human race is racist against robots, and Michelle gets over her fear of this lemonhead machine very quickly, setting down her knife before she has any reason to believe that it isn't going to do exactly what her society says robots do. (This is the part where I make a timely comment about how the movie about AI feels like it was written by AI lolz.)

Michelle's only clue to finding her brother is "a doctor with glasses." You watch this and think, "Well, gee. I wonder how this slim jumping-off point is going to reveal their untapped problem-solving skills." It doesn't. It mostly reveals how lucky it was that some of the robots were willing to tuck away letters by Ke Huy Quan's doctor once the plot started running out of natural growing room. It's death by a thousand contrivances.

Meanwhile, the plotline of finding out what happened to Millie Bobby Brown's brother at some point acquires a sort of "saving the world" degree of grandiosity without consciously deciding to. All the other players--whose own motivations are way more vague--just kinda meander into the story until we decide it's time to go shut down the bad guys.

Moreover, the film often thinks its nonverbal cues and cinematic shorthand are more polished than they actually are. Pivotal explanations wind up feeling off-the-shelf and are served before you have time to read the nutrition label. After a while, this almost starts to feel deliberate. Like the Russos were hoping if they carted you along fast enough, you wouldn't notice the wheels coming undone. All around, the screenplay is like the midterm paper you were so determined to get right that you spent all the time on drafting--and left no time to proofread before sliding it in just before the midnight deadline.

Having graduated from both of his major franchises, Pratt is very much in his element as the developmentally arrested man child. This is the rare chance to see him billed second, and seeing how relaxed he seems here, you get the idea that there's unironically a future for him as a favorite supporting character--a Legolas or Gimli in a world of Aragorns. Brown meanwhile is like a persistently flickering candle every moment she's onscreen, and you can't help but key in close to her just to catch her glow.

There is also voice work a-plenty from the likes of Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, and Alan Tudyk. It's to everyone's credit that I didn't recognize the celebrities behind the voices until I watched the credits roll, and this is fresh off finishing the third season of Resident Alien.

You can't help but be a little disappointed in those last twenty minutes when you have to accept that this whole machine doesn't work as well as you wanted it to. The movie falters when it realizes it needs to provide "a point" at the end, and you start to wonder whether it ever bothered to prove the thesis it's presenting, or whether it was even thinking about these things at all during the last hour and forty minutes.

The Netflix machine and YouTube criticism being what they are, this movie may wind up being fated for the junkyard, but if so, it's still in better company than any either of those parties will want to admit.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

I had a mixed reaction to Jurassic World: Rebirth, but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory. I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so. Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time. That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Superman

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters. The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention. And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture. I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere. Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized. It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life. Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019. Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke: There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade. See, t he Wiza...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place. There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone. I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

Wicked vs Maleficent

“Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping. Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser. Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog