The Electric State: Everything We Know So Far About The New Netflix Project From The Russo Brothers
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Those dagnabbit Russo Brothers are at it again. The filmmaking duo has stayed very busy since finishing their run in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with "Avengers: Endgame" in 2019. In the last three years alone, the Russos have directed a pair of feature-length films ("Cherry" and "The Gray Man"), co-written the Nextflix movie "Extraction" and its upcoming sequel, and produced Daniels' mind-bending romp "Everything Everywhere All at Once" (which /Film's Jacob Hall declared "the best American movie in years" in his review).
Okay, it's no secret that the more involved the Russos are in their projects of late, the more generic the end result tends to be in the eyes of critics (see also: "The Gray Man," a thriller our own Hoai-Tran Bui has amusingly but fairly dubbed "Fifty Shades of Okay"). Might that change with their next film, the sci-fi adventure "The Electric State"? There's plenty of time to speculate about that between now and the movie's likely arrival on Netflix in 2024, so here's a rundown of what we know for certain as of this moment.
What The Electric State is about
"The Electric State" is based on Simon Stålenhag's 2018 illustrated book of the same name, which follows a teen girl as she searches for her missing brother in an alternate version of 1990s America where a war between humans and robots has left society in ruins. The Russo Brothers' movie adaptation is expected to retain its source material's general premise, though it's possible it may jettison the whole alternate history angle in favor of setting the story in a dystopian post-2022 future.
Another thing to note is that Stålenhag's book takes place in a world that's littered with, per the story's synopsis, "the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system." That line may conjure up not-so-cheery memories of "Ready Player One," though the film's actual plot (like Stålenhag's book) should have far more in common with the recent crop of movies about characters wandering post-apocalyptic landscapes, e.g. "Love and Monsters" and "Finch."
What we know about the cast of The Electric State
Millie Bobby Brown is starring in "The Electric State" as its lead, making this the "Stranger Things" and "Enola Holmes" favorite's latest project with Netflix as well as her first time working with the Russo Brothers as directors. Chris Pratt will co-star in the film as a smuggler whom Brown's protagonist meets on her journey because, apparently, it's now illegal to cast anyone other than Pratt as the Harrison Ford-style rugged character in your movie.
Other "Electric State" actors include Pratt's fellow MCU veteran Anthony Mackie and "The Gray Man" alum Billy Bob Thornton as the voices of, per Variety, Pratt's robot sidekick and "a key figure" in the war between humans and machines. Stanley Tucci and Jason Alexander are also part of the cast, with Giancarlo Esposito playing the Marshall, a human who uses their robotic drone to hunt down Brown's character. Last, but not at all least, Ke Huy Quan is co-starring as a doctor who aids the film's heroes, taking over the role his "Everything Everywhere All at Once" co-star Michelle Yeoh was set to play before she bowed out due to a scheduling conflict.
What we know about the crew of The Electric State
The Russo Brothers are directing "The Electric State" on top of producing along with their AGBO production label co-founder Mike Larocca, Angela Russo-Otstot, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely. Markus and McFeely are also writing the movie's script after penning both "The Gray Man" and all four of the Russo Brothers' MCU films to date.
Most of the other known crew members on "The Electric State" are also people the Russo Brothers have worked with in the past, like special effects supervisor Michael Meinardus ("The Gray Man") and costume designer Judianna Makovsky (who first teamed up with the Russos on "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"). Maybe the shift in genre will help to enliven the siblings' filmmaking after their recent attempts to make their name away from the Marvel sandbox proved more vexing than exciting? They certainly have interesting tastes when it comes to the movies that inspired them, but so far their non-superhero output has fallen well short of their cinematic influences.