We tell about the most cynical project of 2025 – the next blockbuster by the Russo brothers 'The Electric State'

Let's start the story about the film 'The Electric State' from afar. American civilization is ambitious and successful, but young and inexperienced, so it hasn't yet grown a crust of cynicism and become tolerant of its history, the poison of social and domestic political problems. Any of them passes through like a beam, spreads like a crack in the amalgam, and is easily detected even now. 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe' still remain somewhat relevant works about racism and the fate of the American South, rather than carefree voices of ringing nostalgia.

Age-old problems cannot live alone and prayerfully ask for the emergence of half-century-old problems: the drug boom and illegal immigration, which they tried to regulate in '65, but walls are still being built today, and the level of tension does not decrease. And the Russo brothers have something to say about this and more.

The new American film intelligentsia generally loves to talk. About racism, about the US-Mexico border, about sedatives, about alienation and decommunication, about the harms of technological progress, and about everything at once.

An Unappetizing Dish

Russian film critic Mikhail Trofimenkov, a specialist in gastronomic metaphors, contemptuously called the films of Italian Gualtiero Jacopetti a vinaigrette – a heap of manipulative, scandalous, and fabricated stories with an ominous spark of a reactionary colonial gaze. In Jacopetti's defense, it can be argued that he spawned an entire film genre called Mondo (Italian for 'world') and outpaced documentary tradition by decades, subsuming cinema verite and direct cinema.

'The Electric State' is also a vinaigrette, but there's no desire to defend it. Grabbing an armful of national traumas and complexes, the two Cleveland natives crumpled them like pathetic candy wrappers and threw them onto the conveyor belt of a streaming service. Such things can be forgiven to foreigners and debutants, but the Russos are native Americans and the highest-grossing directors of our time. Yet they didn't bother to find the difference between a comic-book narrative striptease and cultural-historical spiritual heritage.

With a light wave of Simon Stålenhag's trembling pen and the Marvel-adapters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, a road movie about a girl in a world of robots who sets out to find her younger brother recalls the sublime and begins to meander through the trenches of the Civil War of 1861, scattering glossy brochures of 'I Have a Dream' and flyers about the dangers of computer technology.

In the company of a post-eclectic narrative trend and Californian screenwriting that thinks Jefferson Davis is Ronan the Accuser, the viewer is offered to spend two hours, and this is potentially the most unpleasant experience in 2025.

Kleptomaniacs should be sympathized with, but the Russo brothers are not kleptomaniacs; they are hacks who repeatedly wash over talentless projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What maxim about racism is 'The Electric State' trying to formulate if it uses robots to demonstrate the fate of the African American population?

According to the film's plot, humans are the sole creators of artificial intelligence. Also, it was humans who developed various designs of robotic bodies, but white people did not form black people from clay, did not carve Indians from a rib, did not fire Mexicans with the force of a thousand suns to the desired emanational state. On a metaphorical and ideological level, 'The Electric State' is an abyss of missed opportunities and a spit the size of a fig bone in the face of the discourse on American identity.

Not Like People

The Russo brothers' opus is also filmed disgustingly. The ultra-fast cinematography of Stephen Windon is suitable for commercial shooting of a car or Tony Stark's jet flights, but in 'The Electric State' the frame moves behind people and anthropomorphic robots, so the 'stylish' camera sweeps clearly do not benefit the dramaturgy: a blockbuster is not a car dealership ad.

The editing also doesn't align with the story's pace: it's choppy and rough, each new cut always anticipates expediency by a second or two. Moreover, its final version resembles a rough cut, so a scene change can unpleasantly surprise, throwing the viewer into a blind spot behind the characters or violating a couple of other unwritten rules.

Unfortunately, young and already established talents flock to the technical and content shortcomings. Millie Bobby Brown nails shut dreams of a flourishing career in big cinema with deaf boards, while Chris Pratt unconsciously leaves a meta-commentary on his current self. His character is tired of life, makes unfunny jokes, and wants to eat, just as he himself barely fits into a superhero costume, occasionally returning to Star-Lord to rest before new failures.

In the last few years, we have witnessed the biggest management crisis, which has affected the previously polished system of the world's film capital more than fires, because a fire can consume material objects of culture, while weak managers pervert thought and lose production technology.

The decision to freeze out the Russo brothers seemed obvious since 'The Gray Man', but three years later Netflix allocated another $320 million for the production of their new project, not including marketing costs.

The failure of 'The Electric State', on one hand, feeds an ephemeral sense of justice, but on the other hand, it does not guarantee that the responsible people have learned the right lessons, so we can only wait for new transformations of Marvel and series repatriates. There's no need to worry about the Russos' fate. Yes, it's manipulative, yes, it's unscrupulous, but at least with big budgets and sluggish investors.

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