The Electric State is a blah sci-fi movie full of big half-assed ideas you’ve seen a bunch of times before. It could have been decent if they had put in more effort and taken anything seriously. Instead it screws around indifferently and ends two hour later without ever mattering to anyone or anything.

It’s set in an alternate mid 90s after a robot uprising where the bots lost and were interned behind a giant wall in the desert… because subtly and not mixing metaphors are things this mover never heard of. Millie Bobby Brown meets a robot she needs to help… Christ Pratt shows up too.

I spent most of the film wondering if someone had uploaded something more interesting to YouTube. By the final half hour, I delayed switching back to Netflix because I’d have to trundle through the rest of this waste of time.

To be fair, it has one decent idea in it… most of the robots are cheerful advertisements for brands that existed before the war. So, for example, Mr. Peanut ran the revolution and is now a broken down husk. I guess we’re saying something about brand recognition in a zillion dollar Netflix film. Boy, I sure learned me a lesson…

But why the film is set in the alternate mid 90s is baffling. The only recognizable gag to the time period are giant VR helmets like they used in the early VR game Dactyl Nightmare. And, to that I say, so what? Just like the robot designs… it’s an idea in search of a point.

The whole dorky movie is an idea in search of a point though. It seems content to just regurgitate all the sci-fi cliches from better (and worse) films. Its full of comedy that rarely works and most of the humans are just walking cliches too. I guess Millie Bobby Brown gets a little emotional heft but it’s in such a thinly drawn storyline that it winds up too much effort for too little interest.

There’s almost no reason to watch this volumetric waste of time and money. In that it cost Netflix so much money makes me frown at the inevitable routine subscription rate increase. For this blob of inoffensive, charm-free, thrill-free nothing of a film.

Score: 69