In 2018, Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag released a graphic novel called "The Electric State." It flew under the radar for a lot of people, but for those who did pick it up, Stålenhag's style of art was mesmerizing. 

The book follows a girl named Michelle, and her robot friend Skip on a cross-country journey through an alternate reality in the 1990s to find Michelle's long-lost brother. The novel doesn't use a lot of words to tell a story, but Stålenhag's art style, giving the reader a "show don't tell" feel, which is a kind of storytelling that I personally love. 

Stålenhag's style combines the surreal with the mundane. In the world of "The Electric State," America is post-war, but who the war was against, the book is vague about. It's suggested that it was something of a civil war, but the war itself isn't the issue. The issue is what the war produced, which is a neural VR tech called "Neurocasters," initially designed to allow the military to fight the war through robotic machines without putting themselves in harm's way, but afterward the tech was opened up for civilian use. 

Neurocasters became highly addictive to the people who preferred the escapism these headsets allowed them. In fact, people became so addicted that some people would die using them, as they'd be unwilling to get up to take care of their own bodies. From time to time in "The Electric State," you see withered husks of the dead still wearing their Neurocasters. 

Stålenhag paints a picture of a post-war America that is now a shadow of its former self because there were too few people living in reality to rebuild it. Huge machines of war are left discarded, the aftermath of the war still prevalent, though the war is long done. The most life you see out of anything are the corporate towers looming over the landscapes that feed and power the Neurocasters that keep people locked in their own minds. It's bleak, but thanks to Stålenhag's art style, oddly beautiful. 

A beautiful nightmare, if you will. 

At some point, Netflix got a hold of the rights to make a film version of it, and handed the adaptation to The Russo brothers, popular for their work on Marvel, including "End Game" and "Captain America: Winter Soldier." I wish they delivered something that honored Stålenhag's incredible work, but instead, they stripped pieces of the art from the book and repurposed it into an adventure film.

One of my chief complaints is that Stålenhag created the world of "The Electric State" to feel abandoned and isolating. Giant war machines loom over nearly-empty highways as autonomous robots lumber across green landscapes and those who didn't die from self-neglect remain motionless in their Neurocasters. It gives you the impression that despite there being signs of life and massive machinery around them, Michelle and Skip are small, vulnerable, and very alone. What life there is feels absent and soulless. 

Even the choice of making a robot as Michelle's companion in the book further isolated her. 

The film, on the hand, feels cluttered and busy. Where Stålenhag gave off the feeling of an eerie silence among giants, the Russo brothers filled it with noise. Where Michelle and Skip felt alone, Michelle and "Cosmo," the revamped companion, feel like they're part of a very busy, very loud world with all sorts of characters both robotic and human, and all of them have so much to say. 

Is the movie bad? 

No, it's actually decent. If this film had come out in the 2000s, it would have done numbers. Stripping the source material out of the equation for a moment, what we get is a passible adventure-comedy that you could sit down with your kids and enjoy. This is a film that may appeal to boys and girls between the ages of 8 to 13, and give parents a chance to enjoy watching something with their kids. As an adult, the film is okay, but you'll walk away from it feeling as if it was missing something. 

And something is. 

The Electric State revolves around a corrupt corporation and its evil CEO willing to do whatever it takes to own the world in the aftermath of a war against AI robots. The film picks up, like the book, in the aftermath of the war, but robots are now relegated to an "exclusion zone" with a tenuous peace treaty between humans and robots. The robots are led by a robotic "Mr. Peanut," (Woody Harrelson) which is one hell of a product placement for Planters, and the evil CEO Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) wants that war to resume for business reasons. 

Caught in the middle is Michele (Millie Bobby Brown) who, like in the book, is off to find her brother but under very different circumstances from the source material. She teams up with smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt) and his own robot companion, Herman (Anthony Mackie) on her adventure. 

The actors do well in their roles. Brown does a good job of balancing a rebellious girl who is emotionally driven to find her brother, and Harrelson's Mr. Peanut ended up being more likeable than I thought a product placement would be. I love Pratt as an actor, but I got the impression he was just playing Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy. Still, he and Mackie create a good comedic team and play well off one another. 

The Electric State has a few laughs, heartfelt moments, and some decent action scenes... but it shouldn't. 

"The Electric State" was not a feel-good story. It was haunting, isolating, and beautiful. The Electric State feels funny, busy, and cluttered. 

Despite the film upping the stakes and the action, it didn't feel nearly as dire as the book, and as such, the story loses what made it special. There's no sense of hopelessness that flavored the original book, and while that may sound like the movie giving it hope would improve it, sometimes hopelessness is a necessary narrative flavor. 

A great example of this is Blade Runner, another dystopian film where despite there being a looming city filled with people, isolation rules and there's no sense that anything will get better. This feeling was continued very well by Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Annihilation (2018) is also a fantastic example of hopelessness, which even managed to take Lovecraftian horror and mix it with haunting beauty. 

The Electric State drops that ball in a big way, and I find that incredibly disappointing and an egregious waste of an opportunity. The film would've been better in the hands of someone like Villeneuve, who knows how to use silence and grand visuals to communicate just as well as action and spectacle. 

And that's the core issue with The Electric State. It's noise that's been heard before. It made a unique story of melancholic isolation and silence in a giant's world that died years ago and made it into a Marvel movie.

If you have kids, give it a watch. They'll get a kick out of it. Otherwise, I'd give it a pass. 

Instead, go read "The Electric State."

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