We have reached a sort of event horizon in the world of blockbusters. Starting roughly 40 years ago in the early era of Star Wars and ‘Amblin’, high-concept movies that rolled adventures into popular genres and then plotted them carefully along SOME of the familiar beats of Joseph Cambell’s story structure took popular culture by storm and defined the massive earning potential of Hollywood in a whole new way.
In the decades since, filmmakers who emulated those filmmakers (who were emulating other filmmakers…) have become distant echoes of once-potent ideas. Lucas, Spielberg, and Zemeckis were playing in the pop sci-fi sandbox of their boomer youth but adding something real somewhere in the game. Something about faith, technology, religion, family… just a tiny taste. Enough to make you feel or think. The Russo brothers, Joss Whedons, and JJ Abrams of the world have echoed that once more, and they instead deliver empty vessels over and over again with films like The Electric State.
‘The Electric State’ Is a Failed Adaptation
The Electric State, Netflix’s insanely expensive small-screen streaming adaptation of a Simon Stålenhag graphic novel by way of the Russo Brothers, presents itself as something kind of new. This isn’t Back to the Future the Musical Part 4, or Star Wars Episode 12, or Jurassic World: Galaxy, or whatever. These are new adventures in a new universe with new characters. Right? Right….?
Wrong.
What is Chris Pratt’s smuggler but a strange distant reflection of Han Solo, who himself was already a bit of a reference to the post-war disillusioned male popularized by Humphrey Bogart or the daring swashbuckler popularized by Errol Flynn? This character started in earlier decades of cinema, reflecting the men who’d been to war and been damaged by what they saw and were forced to redefine ideas of right and wrong. They were tied to a philosophical movement and social-political changes. In 2025, the smuggler who was disillusioned by the war just feels so tired and disconnected. It’s a proxy. It’s a fake. Lucas was creative to throw that ‘type’ into the high-concept sci-fi pop culture landscape. But it’s been nearly 50 years since then. Might be time to move on.
We are so far removed now from who this character is or what he was; we’re just watching people imitate it all with empty gestures. We’re given obligatory scenes about personal struggle or character or ‘growth’ tethered to nothing genuine anywhere.
‘The Electric State’ Is a Copy of a Copy of a Copy
Anthony and Joe Russo found massive success adapting the Marvel franchise as it unfurled in its earlier phases. Before that, they embodied a kind of Gen-X non-humor humor on shows like Community, where writer Dan Harmon’s process became famous for its popularized dumbing down the Joseph Campbell structure into something so basic that every episode of a sitcom could follow it. The problem with formulas is they get familiar fast.
Once everyone starts doing Save the Cat meets Dan Harmon’s simple take of Joseph Campbell, we enter a homogenized state where nothing means anything. Nobody is expressing anything. Even the jokes are empty references to other things, other franchises, other shows and movies. Multiple generations are so deeply ensconced in their own interest in pop culture that we are just in an endless feedback loop. What’s the quickest way to communicate to the executive that I understand a basic plot? It’s a creative horror show for a studio to spend over $300 million just for us to gaze deeper into this void. That’s precisely what The Electric State is.
Ironically, The Electric State is partly about people escaping all reality into a strange proxy existence and partly about automations and robots. Clumsy lines can easily be drawn between the movies’ half-baked ideas and our current obsession with phones, our relationship with AI, and social media. The real powerful metaphor, however, is how the junk-laden desert of zombie humans staring at the broken world of The Electric State is like the creatively bankrupt landscape of blockbuster cinema.
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We don’t have to wait long to unpack the mysteries of this latest post-apocalypse.
Look no further than turning John Ford’s Western world of Monument Valley into a place full of hideously mangled technology to see the sharp relief. Once a popular genre like the Western stood as a Trojan horse, bringing an audience in with something deceptively simple but delivering something deep that raises questions and pushes boundaries. The Searchers was a Western on the surface but a debate about the rage-filled racial conflicts and dynamics that defined the very foundation of the American experience. It left no clear ‘answer’ as to how all those things fit together. It inspired generations to think more and create art that does the same. The film school filmmakers, again, emulated it. They referenced it. Martin Scorsese says he watched it over and over.
Monument Valley was beautiful to gaze upon, but why? What happened in those scenes against that landscape? In The Electric State, we look upon it again, but now it’s just a post-modern apocalypse of broken junk. The Electric State is one of the most expensive feature film endeavors of all time, and you can tell by watching it, even on your tinier streaming devices. The cast is loaded with big names, faces, and/or voices. Every small role seems inhabited by someone massively famous or popular, and the visuals are on the grandest of scales, with massive VFX to fit an insane landscape. It’s almost personally insulting that people would spend this kind of money on a movie and not put it in a theater.
The Electric State is not good. There is no other way to put it. People will stream it because it’s promoted heavily, has an all-star cast, has a ton of high-quality visuals, and they might even enjoy it. It’s a classic “just turn your brain off for a while” piece of entertainment. But this is why it’s a symptom of a much greater industry-wide disease. The Electric State might seem new because it’s not about a franchise or characters we already know super well. But it won’t take anyone long to realize it’s absolutely about characters we already know super well. Exhaustingly so.
Are We to Blame for the Current State of Movies?
In the most important sense, the audience is responsible for what happens in mainstream cinema. What do we tune into? What will we show up for? Movies like Warfare and The Nickel Boys, which push the limits of the medium and ask audiences to think about the world in new ways, are actual works of art. They are also not as pleasant as a $300 million colorful joyride, even if it is through familiar tropes. The Oscars serve as a method for introducing mainstream audiences to the projects they might have missed but should consider.
Can audiences actually just be more choosy? Can we ask a little more of ourselves when we pick what we watch and, in turn, ask more of our filmmakers? That will always be the question. The reality is we are not powerless to get better movies than The Electric State. To blame the filmmakers is actually the easy way out. Audiences need to take responsibility for what ends up on screens, and it’s probably time we all took our part in things more seriously if we care about quality experience and the future of the medium itself. The Electric State is streaming now on Netflix.
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