Most robot-uprising movies begin at a pivotal moment: The machines have become sentient, and decide to go nuclear on the humans that created and used them. But The Electric State, adapted from the 2018 graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag, is not like most robot-uprising tales. The film, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, explores what happens long after that particular conflict has played out: It is set in an alternate reality, sometime during the 1990s, and robots have already lost the war against humans. That doesn’t mean, however, that the vibes between humans and machines are suddenly good. Power struggles still spark between tech moguls and scientists; robots live in exile on the margins of society; and an orphaned teenager named Michelle (Millie Bobbie Brown) decides to take on the current world order. She teams up with Keats (Chris Pratt), a low-rent smuggler, and their respective robot sidekicks Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk) and Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), as she traverses the American West in search of her brother Christopher (Woody Norman), who she’d long believed was dead.
If you’ve already finished The Electric State, here’s a deep dive into the shocking and emotional ending, the creation of the groundbreaking visual world, the themes explored throughout the film, and one particularly hilarious Easter egg.
Unhinged tech mogul Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) has been holding Christopher’s still-living body in the Sentre headquarters in Seattle. Michelle learns from the mechanical manifestation of Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) that Christopher’s genius brain is powering the mainframe of Sentre’s entire network. Disconnect him, and all the technology that Skate created to power military drones, as well as the neurocaster technology as a whole, will go offline.
Amid an epic clash of robots, drones, and people, Michelle enters the Sentre headquarters. “We were thrilled over the fact that we could focus part of that climax simply on the relationship between Michelle and Christopher, the brother-sister relationship,” Joe Russo tells Tudum, “because the movie is so much of a journey toward that moment for both of those characters.”
Michelle puts on the neurocaster helmet, which she’s avoided up until now, to speak to Christopher’s mind directly. Christopher lets her know, “I think I need to die. And I think you need to be the one to do it.” There’s no undoing what has already happened to the world. There’s still time to make a brighter future, but it requires a huge sacrifice. In an emotional climax, Michelle must shut down Christopher’s life functions.
“Michelle knew there was something missing within her life [after her family died in the car accident],” Brown explains to Tudum. “Once she realizes her brother is out there, I think she has this really beautiful journey … ‘I must find him. I must get him back to me.’ Toward the end, she realizes that in order to get him back, she has to let go of him and remember him for who he was. I think that letting go was very therapeutic and cathartic for her. It’s exactly what she needed to move forward in her life.”
Drones powered by Sentre shut off all around the world, and news of their experimentation on a human child gets out and brings down Sentre and Skate. Michelle puts out a video message that goes global –– and it’s not all anti-technology.
Joe Russo tells Tudum, “Technology has incredible positives and can have an incredible impact on society, but it has tremendous negatives, and those negatives include being addicted to it or using it to disconnect from others around you. And the more we do that, the more we find that we don’t treat each other as well, and we can’t communicate as well with one another. If there’s any message in the film, it’s to stay connected to the people around you.”
Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) also has a major epiphany. In Skate, he discovers there’s something less human than a robot — and is able to make peace with Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson), the de facto figurehead of the robot resistance.
In a landfill, as “Wonderwall” by Oasis plays, Cosmo, who’s been the emotional center of Michelle’s journey, comes back to life — a sign that Christopher’s consciousness might not be completely gone; maybe some of his electricity still exists in Cosmo’s wiring.
Herman appears to be damaged beyond repair at the end of the final battle. Luckily, however, Herman comes in many sizes, and his big dome head opens up to reveal a miniature version of himself … but not before Keats pours his true feelings out, which Herman, of course, roasts him for. Still, it’s a full circle moment for these lifelong bros.
“Keats and Herman are an odd couple — one’s a human being, the other is a robot,” Anthony Russo told Netflix. “While the banter between them is ridiculous, they have an important shared experience. During the war, they were adversaries who found a source of friendship and humanity in one another. There’s a unique bond between the two of them and Chris and Anthony infused so much humanity and humor into that bond.”
“I’m really grateful to Netflix that they let me have that haircut for at least half the movie,” Pratt tells Tudum. “That was pretty bold of them.”
Keats’ unfashionable mane of golden curls signals he is living in the past. At first, he is a classic mercenary. “He thinks he’s living in a world that’s too far gone,” says Pratt, “and he’s just been running from the ghost of his past and the wound of being abandoned and almost murdered by his army.” But meeting Michelle brings Keats into a more engaged, present state. “To see a young woman in search of something greater than herself, who won’t give up, who has hope — she’s this ray of light for him and something to give him to live for.”
You don’t have a film unless you can feel real emotions for Cosmo, Herman, and the motley crew of mechanical service robots hiding out in the Blue Sky Acres Mall. For the look of the main cast of robots, the filmmakers were going for a specific retro-futuristic aesthetic –– robots who performed a particular service for humans –– like US Postal Service robot Penny Pal (voiced by Jenny Slate) and familiar marketing characters like Mr. Peanut.
“Our goal was to create a world that felt fully lived-in, and that meant designing an ensemble of robots that each had a distinct function and personality,” says Joe Russo. “The robots in The Electric State had to feel authentic to this alternate 1990s but still had roots in recognizable designs. When working with [production designer] Dennis Gassner and his team, the directive we gave was that these robots should feel familiar, almost like something you might have seen in an old commercial or a local mall.”
VFX supervisor Matthew Butler and his team worked hard to keep the robots believable and solidly rooted by physics. They studied machine behavior on real-world assembly lines and found creative ways to give the robots emotions –– even Cosmo, who has a permanently painted-on smile on his face. “He’s got stereoscopic camera vision, but the camera has a green light ring in it, so that we could animate a twinkle,” Butler told Tudum. “It went from dead to alive. It’s a soul.”
Perhaps the main reason the robots feel so alive is that human motion capture performers played as much of a role as voice actors in bringing the characters to life. Movement choreographer Terry Notary put together a troupe of seven performers –– including himself –– to play them. Brown reunited with Devyn Dalton, one of the mo-cap actors, to portray Cosmo. “It’s very easy to develop a bond like that when you have such an amazing mo-cap actor like Devyn, who played Cosmo on set,” she said. “She and I had already worked together before when I was 9-years-old on a project in Canada and it actually became more of a sisterly bond.”
Pratt also had a longstanding friendship with Martin Klebba, the mo-cap actor for Herman, which came in handy on set. “My relationship with Herman is actually built upon my pre-existing relationship with Marty, who’s a wisecracking, absolutely hilarious dude,” Pratt said. “Sometimes he was saying lines that were fed to him by Chris Castaldi or Joe Russo … Joe has a background in improv and can really spar comedically. A lot of that banter came from Joe saying crazy stuff and turning the [relationship between Herman and Keats] into something that wasn’t on the page.”
There are tons of nods to the larger world of Stålenhag’s universe, as well as too many ’90s references to list, many of which come in the form of archival newsreel footage (yes, that was former President Bill Clinton addressing the nation about robot wars). But there’s one Easter egg that the Russos want to bring viewers’ attention to. Joe Russo teases, “They should keep their eyes open in the third act, which is the last 20-25 minutes of the movie, for an Arrested Development Easter egg.”
To learn more about the world of The Electric State, listen to State Secrets: Inside the Making of The Electric State, the official companion podcast to the film. You can watch the first episode below:
