The Electric State review: Millie Bobby Brown leads a retro-future that actually hits

The Electric State. Futuristic, but not too much. Retro, but not just nostalgic. Post-apocalyptic, but somehow filled with warmth. It isn’t trying to be The Iron Giant, nor is it drowning in pop culture references like Ready Player One.

Instead, it carves out its own space. Somewhere between heart-wrenching dystopia and a deeply personal road trip through a world that crumbled before it ever fully thrived.

Directed by the Russo Brothers, and starring Millie Bobby Brown alongside Chris Pratt, The Electric State doesn’t just tell a story. It hums with memory, resistance, and a strangely hopeful kind of silence.

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The Electric State and its bitpunk vision of collapse

Set in an alternate version of the 1990s, the film presents a retro-futuristic vision of America where rusted corporate drones roam empty highways and broken tech still flickers with traces of life. This isn’t the clean chrome of cyberpunk, nor the whimsy of steampunk. It’s something else. Something grittier. Analog. Bitpunk.

This broken world still echoes with the consequences of a war between humans and machines. Towering mechs, now obsolete and terrifying, are relics of a misguided war powered by the Neurocaster, a device that allowed humans to control drone bodies with their minds. The irony? To defeat the machines, they became machines themselves.

In this story, technology isn’t just worldbuilding. It’s legacy. Trauma. Memory etched in circuitry and rust.

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What (some) critics missed about the film’s emotional core

Some critics have called it soulless. That’s not just a bad take. It’s the kind of take that makes you wonder if we watched the same movie.

This film has soul in abundance. Not loud. Not flashy. But it’s there. In the silence between lines. In the eyes of Millie Bobby Brown’s Michelle as she scans the wreckage of a dying world. In the way these characters, both human and machine, cling to each other with the last flickers of trust and tenderness.

There’s a line that cuts deep:

“I finally met someone less human than a robot.”

That’s not just edgy writing. That’s the thesis. The true monsters here aren’t circuits and metal. They’re the systems that made exploitation look like progress. The war wasn’t started by machines. It was started by the people who refused to see machines as anything more than tools.

The thesis of the film could’ve easily been stretched into a mind-bending series like Severance. But the emotional bitpunk road trip brought to the screen by the Russo Brothers takes a seemingly simpler route.

Don’t be fooled though. The ideas are still there. The themes are heavy—loss, identity, post-humanism, labor, memory—only wrapped in something a little more palatable, a little more tender. There’s cuteness, yes. But there’s also heartbreak. There’s sadness etched in every panel, in every frame of rust and silence. You just have to look a little bit closer.

And if that doesn’t sound familiar, you’re not paying attention.

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The Electric State uses music to carry its soul

We’ll dive deeper into the soundtrack in a separate article, but The Electric State makes its mixtape matter. It’s not just mood. It’s plot. It’s heartbeat.

From the soft ache of Every Rose Has Its Thorn to the explosive energy of Breaking the Law during that perfect Meat and Metal moment, every song pushes something forward. There’s even a cheeky little nod to Guardians of the Galaxy when Chris Pratt’s character asks for a track, but it doesn’t feel meta for meta’s sake. It lands because it fits.

In The Electric State, music isn’t ornamental. It’s emotional shorthand. It’s memory on repeat.

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Why The Electric State deserves to be remembered

So, is this revolutionary? The most groundbreaking sci-fi in recent years? No.

Does it reinvent the wheel? Not really.

But does it tell a story that feels relevant, haunting, and surprisingly tender? Absolutely.

This is not a film built to dazzle with spectacle. It’s a film that lingers. It takes its time. It wants you to listen, to watch, to feel. It dares to ask questions about empathy, identity, and who gets to be seen as “real” in a world that’s forgotten how to care.

It’s not The Iron Giant. It’s not Ready Player One. It’s something else. And in a landscape flooded with noise, The Electric State finds its voice. Quiet, yes. But unmistakably human.

If The Iron Giant is the gold standard of soulful, AI-driven storytelling, and Ready Player One is the overcaffeinated pop-culture fever dream of its era, The Electric State sits in its own lane. It doesn’t yell. It resonates.

Rating with a touch of flair: 5 out of 5 battered robots rising for one last fight.