Despite its budget, "The Electric State" fails to meet expectations

Taken from the books and especially from the illustrations of Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State is the second adaptation of one of the works of the Swedish writer and artist who combined retrofuturism with the idea of an imaginary world with soft, misty colors and atmospheres, where amidst the fog stand his gigantic buildings, objects, and robots. The horizon in the concept designer’s drawings is continuously enveloped by a gloomy haze, preventing the eye from seeing beyond but leading it toward the vastness of the androids often incorporated into the landscape. This sense of a suspended future, a possible tomorrow driven towards increasing integration between humans and technology, where nature becomes the new home of titans of metal and steel, was audiovisually captured by Loop on Prime Video. A series that, while having to sacrifice some of the poetry that Stålenhag paints in his works, including the illustrated book Tales From the Loop published in 2014, tried to maintain an aura of mystery in its images, conveying both a sense of memory and detachment that the Swedish artist’s vision of tomorrow seeks to tell—something we have always known but have never seen. Closeness and constant dissociation. The fields, the vegetation, the isolated farmhouses, and, right next to them, the hyper-technological future.

Even though one could not hope for the same sense of the unknown in The Electric State, the trivialized and flat execution of the work is, first and foremost, the furthest thing from the idea of representation that one could have hoped or imagined based on Simon Stålenhag’s pages. There are two main reasons. The first is that the project was entrusted to Netflix, which, in recent times, has been diluting its visual experimentation, reducing itself to a clarity and an overly explicit staging that leaves no room for illusion. Fantasy, invention, and dreamlike elements are all immediate and revealed, leaving nothing to assume or investigate. What is shown is simply what it is, reducing the thrill of discovery as the scenes unfold. The second reason is that the film adaptation was entrusted to Anthony and Joe Russo, despite them having established their own style. After the blockbuster success of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and after delivering two successful Captain America films—first The Winter Soldier (2014) and then Civil War (2016)—the duo’s descent has been steep and resounding, as if they had tried to replicate the uniqueness of what happened with Marvel’s Infinity Saga but ended up entangling themselves.

With The Electric State, the budget was off the charts: according to reports, it reached a staggering $320 million. The fact that the film’s reception after its premiere at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles was among the most difficult, despite such a massive investment by Netflix, should make the streaming service reflect—though whether they only care about viewership numbers is another matter. In an era where low-budget films triumphed at the 2025 Oscars (from Anora to The Brutalist), the results of The Electric State should further highlight the gap created by the entertainment industry and the need to recover by allocating funds and support to projects with a genuine artistic vision, rather than homogenized works. Or at least to productions that know how to make good use of such large budgets, which, in Netflix’s case, likely went into the massive amount of VFX—which, to be fair, did a decent job. The rest presumably went into the pockets of two stars like Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, for a film that ultimately shrinks into a classic adventure journey set in an environment that is as implausible as it is bland, lacking the profound sense of wonder evoked by Simon Stålenhag’s creations. Everything is reduced to minimal spectacle, stylized relationships, and a war between merging worlds that inevitably resorts to battle. Imagination is stripped down where it should have been pushed beyond boundaries, which remain too clearly defined in The Electric State, making for a cinema that certainly has the resources but not the imagination.