The Electric State: can it get much worse?
By Jonathan Brown
Introduction
As I sat through The Electric State — Netflix’s latest blockbuster spectacle, directed by the Russo Brothers of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) fame — I couldn’t help but recall a provocative statement made by the renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese. In a 2019 interview with Empire Magazine, Scorsese famously argued that Marvel movies are not “cinema” in the traditional sense, but more akin to theme parks: engineered spectacles built for sensory thrills, mass appeal, and maximum profitability.
In Scorsese’s view, Marvel films are safe, formulaic, and driven by corporate mandates, lacking the personal vision, artistic risk, and emotional depth traditionally associated with real cinema. Although technically not a Marvel film, Scorsese’s criticism applies perfectly to The Electric State. The film doesn’t feel like a work of art, but rather like a ride: sleek, loud, visually busy, and emotionally hollow. Perhaps Scorsese was right. This isn’t cinema; it’s a theme park attraction masquerading as a film.
In this article, I argue that The Electric State aspires to be more than just a bloated visual spectacle. The Russo Brothers attempt to construct a science fiction world that warns of technological overreach and the alienation brought on by digital life in late capitalist society. In doing so, the film positions itself within a long tradition of dystopian science fiction — stories that reflect anxieties about machines supplanting human connection and creativity. Yet despite these gestures toward social critique, the film’s message ultimately rings hollow. Distributed by Netflix, a platform that thrives on the very digital alienation the film seeks to condemn, The Electric State becomes a contradiction unto itself. It is a multi-million-dollar production that feigns concern over the loss of authentic experience while delivering that concern in the form of commodified spectacle — repackaging alienation as entertainment, one algorithmic recommendation at a time.
The Russo Brothers: From Sitcoms to Superheroes
Anthony and Joe Russo — known professionally as the Russo Brothers — began their careers in television, working on acclaimed sitcoms like Arrested Development (2003–2005) and Community (2009–2014). Their early work was sharp and competent, blending humor with a touch of surrealism. But their true breakout came when Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige pulled them from relative obscurity and brought them into the MCU. After directing two commercially successful entries in the Captain America series, the Russos were handed the monumental task of helming Avengers: Infinity War (2018), the culmination of a decade’s worth of interconnected MCU films, pulling together dozens of characters — including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, and the Guardians of the Galaxy — into one massive crossover spectacle that epitomized the franchise’s unprecedented scale and commercial ambition. Infinity War became the first superhero film to gross over $2 billion at the global box office. The Russos repeated that feat with Avengers: Endgame (2019), which matched — and ultimately surpassed — its predecessor in commercial success.
Avengers: Endgame
The Russo Brothers’ work on the MCU exemplifies everything Scorsese warned about when he compared Marvel movies to theme parks. When confronted with Scorsese’s remarks, the Russos dismissed the critique by boasting about box office returns — a telling response that underscored their fundamentally commercial approach to filmmaking. The Russos are not visionary auteurs, but competent studio hands: directors who execute corporate mandates with efficiency, but little artistic ambition. Their films are functional rather than expressive, marked by a lack of visual style, thematic depth, or creative risk. More managers than filmmakers, they deliver safe, market-tested spectacles designed for mass consumption. Their success lies not in directorial brilliance, but in their ability to serve the Marvel Studios formula under the tight oversight of Kevin Feige. In this context, the Russos are ideal company men — directors who make movies by committee, not by inspiration.
Since their tenure at Marvel, the Russos have had considerably less success in their directorial efforts. Outside the protective framework of Kevin Feige’s MCU apparatus, their films have struggled to gain either critical acclaim or cultural relevance. Projects like Cherry (2021) — an overwrought, stylistically muddled character drama, and The Gray Man (2022), a derivative, spectacle-driven action film — were met with tepid reviews and widespread indifference. Yet despite these misfires, Netflix entrusted them with The Electric State, a sprawling, effects-heavy science fiction epic with a reported $320 million budget — making it one of the most expensive films ever produced. Unlike the MCU films, which rely on beloved comic book characters with built-in fanbases, The Electric State lacks any form of name-brand recognition. Although technically not a superhero film, it feels indistinguishable from one — laden with CGI, driven by formulaic action beats, and saturated with synthetic sentimentality. The film has been a complete critical failure, receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews and quickly vanishing from public conversation — a stark contrast to the cultural staying power of the Russos’ MCU projects. It takes the worst tendencies of the bloated Marvel formula and runs them into the ground, exposing the creative bankruptcy of the Russos’ corporate-driven style — and the broader cultural exhaustion of late capitalist media.
The Electric State isn’t just a bad film — it’s the byproduct of a system running on empty. Its recycled plot, hollow emotional arcs, and toothless gestures toward critique reflect the broader collapse of mainstream filmmaking under late capitalism. It hints at themes like digital addiction, emotional alienation, and the collapse of meaning in a hypermediated world — but never develops any of them coherently. Instead, it becomes exactly what it pretends to oppose: a sleek, soulless spectacle engineered for passive consumption. Its vacuity isn’t accidental — it’s the logical outcome of an industry governed not by artistic vision, but by the demands of content algorithms, brand synergy, and risk-averse executives.
To see how this plays out on screen, we have to start with the film’s so-called “story” — or more precisely, its incoherent and disjointed attempt at one.
The Hollow Dystopian Narrative of The Electric State
The Electric State follows a familiar post-apocalyptic narrative structure: a young protagonist, Michelle (played by Millie Bobby Brown), journeys across a desolate, retro-futuristic 1990s America in search of her missing brother, accompanied by a loyal robot named Cosmo. Along the way, she joins forces with a sarcastic rogue, played by Chris Pratt — essentially reprising his Guardians of the Galaxy persona with minimal variation.
Drawing heavily from recycled sci-fi tropes, the film gestures at themes of technological overreach and the erosion of authentic human connection. It frames itself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of immersive virtual reality, depicting a society in which large swaths of the population have abandoned the real world entirely, escaping into a device called the Neurocaster — an advanced headset that allows users to retreat into manufactured fantasy worlds. This mass withdrawal into digital illusion forms the emotional and visual backdrop of the film, setting the stage for a final act marked by explosive spectacle and sensory overload — the default climax of today’s blockbuster cinema.
The film’s primary antagonist is Ethan Skade, a cartoonishly evil tech billionaire who bears a not-so-subtle resemblance to real-world oligarchs like Jeff Bezos. Skade is the CEO of the tech giant Sentre, the corporation behind the Neurocaster technology. As the plot unfolds, we learn that Michelle’s missing brother, Christopher — a child prodigy — has been kept in a comatose state by Sentre, with his brain wired into the global network. His consciousness functions as the central processor powering the entire system of virtual escapism. In the film’s climactic resolution, Michelle disconnects her brother from the grid, resulting in the collapse of the Neurocaster system. The world awakens from its digital trance, and Sentre’s monopoly crumbles in a final explosion of cathartic spectacle.
Despite its dystopian premise, The Electric State offers no real critique of the social relations or economic structures that gave rise to its crisis. Instead, it presents itself as a cautionary tale about the dangers of technological overreach — a common trope in science fiction literature. This theme dates back to E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops (1909), which depicted a dystopian future in which people live isolated underground, utterly dependent on a giant machine for all needs. Numerous popular science fiction films throughout the 20th century have portrayed advanced technology as a source of danger, dehumanization, or societal decay. Films like The Matrix (1999), for example, brought the “technology as threat” motif to mainstream audiences, warning of the danger of a virtual world replacing reality.
The Matrix
Most works of dystopian science fiction function as cautionary tales about the capacity for technology to diminish our humanity. This message, however, contrasts quite starkly with the Marxian view that the root problem is not technology itself, but the social system in which it operates. Rather than seeing technology as inherently dangerous, Marxian thinkers have long viewed technology as a potentially revolutionary, positive force. In a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels marveled at the transformative power of technological progress:
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
Marx and Engels recognized that capitalism’s development of industry, science, and technology was historically unprecedented and, in many ways, progressive. Rather than treat technology as inherently evil, they argued that capitalism was to blame for developing and deploying technology in a chaotic, alienating, and ultimately harmful manner. They famously likened capitalism to a “sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” The immense productive forces unleashed by modern industry come into conflict with the system itself, because capitalism, driven by the profit motive, cannot fully harness them for the common good. In this sense, the dystopian futures that science fiction so often warns us about are not the result of technology per se, but of the capitalist system that distorts and weaponizes it. In short, it’s not the machine that threatens us — it’s who owns it, and why.
But The Electric State doesn’t even begin to broach that sort of systemic critique of the class forces driving the alienating effects of digital technology. Instead, the film’s narrative framework erases any meaningful depiction of economic relations or class struggle. Sentre, the tech conglomerate responsible for the Neurocaster, exists as a vague evil in the background — its profit motives and mechanisms of accumulation never examined, its rise to power left unexplained. Who owns the company? Who builds the machines? Who profits from the technological enslavement of society? These are questions the film never asks, because it isn’t interested in exploring the social relations behind technology. There are no workers, no organizing, no strikes, no uprisings — just isolated individuals wandering a desolate world, as if history and struggle had simply evaporated.
In place of collective struggle, The Electric State offers the familiar fantasy of the lone saviour — a single protagonist whose moral clarity and personal determination are portrayed as sufficient to redirect history. Millie Bobby Brown’s character, Michelle, is classless and detached: not a working-class hero resisting corporate tyranny, but a neutral everywoman with no structural ties to the world she inhabits. Her fight against Sentre is framed not as the product of class antagonism, but as a personal quest to reconnect with her long-lost brother. And just as the film offers a singular hero, it also constructs a singular villain: the megalomaniacal CEO Ethan Skade is not portrayed as a representative of the capitalist class or of systemic exploitation, but as a rogue outlier — a “bad apple” whose removal restores moral balance. This framing reduces class exploitation to the pathology of one evil man, narrowing the scope of critique to personal morality. It reproduces the neoliberal myth that social change stems not from class struggle, but from the virtuous will of a singular, heroic individual. The effect is not merely ideological — it is demobilizing. It invites viewers to identify with the hero’s journey while foreclosing any vision of collective action.
Capitalism and Digital Commodification
Much has already been said about the blatant hypocrisy of The Electric State’s core message — a call to “unplug” from digital escapism — despite being a Netflix product engineered for passive, algorithmic consumption. The moral of the story (“go outside and touch grass”) is not only obvious, but also fatally undermined by the very platform distributing it. While the film gestures at a critique of passive consumerism, it was never capable of delivering one. Netflix, a profit-driven enterprise built on dopamine-driven engagement metrics, could never seriously sustain a meaningful anti-consumerist message.
For this reason, The Electric State is not a film meant to be watched in any serious or reflective sense. It is designed to be half-watched, forgotten, and replaced by the next autoplay recommendation. It serves as ideal background noise for viewers scrolling on their phones, barely paying attention. Within this context, the Russo Brothers’ attempt to warn about the collapse of human connection rings hollow. The film’s message about lost human connection is distributed through a platform explicitly designed to replace real-world experience with mindless, numbing content — the cinematic equivalent of cotton candy. In the end, The Electric State is not a critique of digital alienation, but a perfect expression of it.
The key to understanding the hypocrisy of The Electric State’s anti-consumerist message lies in philosopher Robert Pfaller’s concept of interpassivity. For Pfaller, interpassivity describes a paradoxical mode of engagement under late capitalism, in which our critical and political impulses are delegated to media objects that “do the thinking” for us. We aren’t passive in the traditional sense — we engage with critical media, but outsource real action to the objects we consume.
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher extended this idea, noting that “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism.” Hollywood films frequently feature evil corporations as villains, but rather than challenging capitalist ideology, this gesture reinforces it. As Fisher puts it, such films “perform our anti-capitalism for us,” allowing us to consume with moral impunity. The Electric State functions in precisely this way. It invites us to feel critical — of technology, of corporate power, of social decay — but relieves us of the burden of translating those feelings into action. The film simulates the experience of resistance while safely containing it within passive consumption. By offering the illusion of critique without demanding change, it neutralizes dissent before it can materialize.
Yet even the film’s hollow gesture at anti-capitalism is undermined by its brazen use of product placement — something the Russo Brothers deploy with all the subtlety of a Super Bowl ad. While branded content is standard fare in Hollywood, The Electric State takes it to absurd extremes. Nearly every scene doubles as a marketing opportunity, with logos and products inserted so conspicuously that they rupture any sense of immersion. In one especially jarring moment, characters recite a Panda Express menu out loud — a surreal reminder that even dystopia must be monetized. The film simply plugs existing brands into its post-apocalyptic backdrop, suggesting that consumer culture will survive the collapse of society itself. This exemplifies what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” — the pervasive sense that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The Electric State makes that dilemma literal: even in ruins, the corporate logos remain.
Perhaps the most absurd illustration of the Russos’ tonal incoherence is the inclusion of Mr. Peanut — the Planters mascot — as a central character in the film. Portrayed as the robotic leader of a resistance army, Mr. Peanut delivers impassioned speeches about freedom and rebellion against digital tyranny, all without a hint of irony or satire. The film earnestly treats this corporate logo as a heroic figure, as if viewers are meant to rally behind a literal snack brand in the fight against consumer alienation. The result is unintentionally comical: a supposed critique of corporate power that casts a consumer mascot as a revolutionary icon. The contradiction is so glaring it borders on parody — yet the film plays it straight. As one reviewer wryly summed it up, “remember, kids: phones are no substitute for real human friendship. Now, here’s a word from our sponsor, Planters Peanuts.”
Conclusion
Let us return to Martin Scorsese’s famous critique of modern blockbuster filmmaking. If Marvel films marked, in Scorsese’s words, the rise of “theme park” cinema, then The Electric State represents not just a continuation of that model, but its nadir — the absolute low point of late capitalist Hollywood’s “films as theme parks” era. At least Marvel films, for all their flaws, are able to successfully draw on decades of comic book history, popular characters, and a rich tradition of serialized storytelling. The Electric State has none of that to lean on. It is a bloated $320 million monstrosity — a film that says nothing, critiques nothing, and offers nothing beyond recycled imagery and hollow spectacle. It is not even a theme park ride. It is worse: a lumbering, overwrought monument to creative exhaustion, cultural decay, and the ideological paralysis of late capitalism.
The film’s narrative mistakes are not incidental; they are symptomatic. Instead of diagnosing the material basis of social alienation in class society, The Electric State blames technology itself. It offers a neoliberal fantasy of salvation through lone individual heroism, erasing any possibility of collective struggle or systemic transformation. It attempts to “perform” anti-capitalist critique on behalf of its audience, offering the emotional satisfaction of dissent while leaving viewers passively embedded within the very system it pretends to oppose. Meanwhile, it bombards the audience with a confused mish-mash of dystopian imagery and corporate branding, layering its half-hearted social commentary under an avalanche of product placement and marketing tie-ins.
In total, The Electric State is not just a creative failure for Netflix and the Russo Brothers; it is a cultural artifact of capitalism in decay. It embodies the rot at the heart of late capitalist culture — a society that can no longer even imagine a coherent alternative future, nor produce a science fiction story capable of meaningful commentary. Worse still, whereas Marvel’s “theme park” films at least offer kinetic excitement, The Electric State cannot even deliver on that basic promise. It is joyless, aimless, and inert.
If there is a silver lining, it is this: perhaps reaching such a low point signals that a turning point is near. When spectacle can no longer sustain itself, when cultural production becomes so hollow that even passive audiences grow restless, there may yet be an opportunity for a return to genuine artistry, real storytelling, and authentic cinema — a culture capable of imagining a future beyond capitalism.
