So, Who's Killing the Movies -- The Electric State Review
They've made the most successful films of all time, and yet, they'll die without a trace
James Cameron gets a lot of sh*t, and to be fair, he probably deserves it. Great art has never been about money, and even those of us who defend his money-printers (Titanic, Avatars 1 and 2) have to admit his ego often outpaces his storytelling. Still, that hasn't stopped a vocal corner of the internet from painting him as an unimaginative hack.
But many forget that not only does Cameron share his controversial King of the Box Office crown, but his counterparts are far, far worse.
The Russo Brothers crash-landed into Marvel-land back in 2014’s The Winter Soldier. Where Joe Johnston’s first Captain America leaned into its silly pulp origins, the Russos injected a TV aesthetic—shaky-cam, close-ups, and a muted gray color palette. All these hacky Jason Bourne-isms turned the dopey blonde in Stars and Stripes into a drab killing-government-machine.
Audiences ate it up.
Now fast-forward three Avengers films later, and the Russos have managed to mishandle every post-Endgame blank check, resulting in big-awful-incompetent-disaster. I imagine you haven’t heard of any of them, so why waste your time informing you now?
Sprinkled among these duds are pea-brained comments advocating cinema’s demise. Joe Russo, the more loud of the two, has publicly welcomed the death of the theatrical experience, stating, “So, this idea…that the theater is a sacred space, is bullsh*t.” That particular comment followed a partnership deal with Netflix.
In another exclusive, this time with the pop-culture airheads of Collider, Joe Russo excitedly speculated on the possibilities of AI storytelling:
You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. “Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day,” and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you.”
Moron-entertainment constructed like a Subway sandwich.
The Brothers peaked early when they won Emmys for their work on Fox’s cult classic Arrested Development—though I’d confidently credit all of the show’s genius to Mitchell Hurwitz and Ron Howard. The Brothers spent the next decade directing sitcoms and then took their so-called talent to the silver screen.
Television, a medium who will never be as good as his older brother, film, has unfortunately become the blueprint for today’s movies. Film franchises have become serialized [trivialized] to a mind-numbing extent, eschewing personal, soulful artmaking for crap-churning. Even Disney’s current Marvel plot requires the audience to do the homework of enduring three Disney+ shows to comprehend the next superhero romp.
This nihilistic, dopamine-receptor-pleasing philosophy was nicely lampooned in the recent cult classic, The Matrix Resurrections. Keanu Reeves’s Neo—his corpse literally reanimated by machine suits—is plopped back into the Matrix as renowned game auteur, Tom Anderson. Following the financial flops of personal projects, his boss, Smith, tries to persuade Tom to revisit his old success, The Matrix Trilogy: “I know you said the story was over for you, but that’s the thing about stories… They never really end, do they?” Execs must say the same thing about Star Wars and Superman.
It’s 2025, and every new big-budget venture by Hollywood still concerns itself with serving 80s Gen-X nostalgia. The generation raised on popcorn and plastic continually gets catered with new servings of childhood relics—Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Terminator. It’s an entire audience of man-children (Peter Pan syndrome) who can’t quite wrestle with the concept that some things in life just gotta die.
And yes, I’m seven hundred words into this essay, and still, I haven’t mentioned the film in question.
There’s nothing to say about Netflix’s The Electric State. A film created by imbeciles for imbeciles. It’s an 80s/90s throwback with characters and storylines you’ve already seen, only now at their least sincere. Nothing on screen is pleasant to the senses. If you’re one of those parents who find it easier to park your toddler in front of an iPad, you might be better off letting them watch whatever is on YouTube than this junk. It’s modern media at its most atrocious.
The opportunity to make a movie is surely an awful one to waste.
Priced at three hundred and twenty million dollars, The Electric State is one of the most expensive films ever made! Think of all those David Lynch projects Netflix vetoed before his death that we could have had instead.
With the failure of their past half a dozen projects, Marvel/Disney rehired the Russos to helm their newest Avengers two-parter, along with the supposedly spandex-retired Robert Downey Jr. (this time he’s Doctor Doom).
I’m sure plenty of decent people are working hard on these new movies, but I can’t help but pray the films fail. The first step towards better cinema is choosing not to see the bad ones. But then again, with all this talk of cinema’s painful demise, I can’t help but think of a schizophrenic YouTube comment I once saw:
The world isn’t dying, it’s being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses.
Final Grade: F