After a few years trying to tackle more grounded subject matter, directors Joe and Anthony Russo are getting back in the director’s chair for some bombastic genre fair. Before they return to Marvel to tackle the next pair of Avengers movies, they’ve got The Electric State over at Netflix, which got its first real showing at New York Comic-Con.
Based on Simon Stålenhag’s retrofuturistic graphic novel Tales from the Loop, the film is set in an alternate version of 1994, after a yearslong war between humanity and animatronic robots. Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown plays Michelle, who’s spent years looking for her lost brother (Woody Norman). Instead, he appears to have tracked her down, and has deployed his robot Kid Cosmo to take her to where he’s hiding out. Naturally, it’s not as simple as it sounds, and the pair need to hitch a ride with Chris Pratt’s veteran-turned-smuggler Keats and his own robot pal Herman (Anthony Mackie) to find her brother and learn why he went missing to begin with.
Thus, the quartet travel through the post-apocalypse, taking in sights like the exclusion zone where the robots went after the war ended in a stalemate. Along with the general setup, the trailer shows us how many robots are still around, and the answer is a lot: many are human-sized, but others are massive enough to carry RVs like they’re nothing or swat their smaller mechanical brethren out of the air like flies. If you’ve ever wanted to see Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) and Star-Lord take up arms against a decayed theme park robot, The Electric State looks to give you your fix.
Also starring Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, and Ke Huy Quan, The Electric State hits Netflix on March 14.
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