By Rollo Ross and Danielle Broadway
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – American filmmakers and brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, the directing team behind Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” aim to transport audiences to an alternate timeline in their film “The Electric State,” which begins streaming on Netflix on Friday.
“The intention was to make a live-action Pixar movie,” Joe Russo told Reuters, referring to the animation studio.
“We wanted that same tone and depth of storytelling, emotion, laughter, tears, you know, really wanted to bring as full an experience we could do a live-action movie but really trying to be as inspired as we could by Pixar,” he added.
Set in an alternate 1997, the film introduces a world that has just ended a war against robots, which are now outlawed and put into a zone in the American Midwest.
The film follows Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, who has seemingly lost all her family members in a car crash.
However, when a robot arrives in her house, claiming to be her presumed dead brother Christopher, she decides to head to the zone to find her brother’s physical body.
Along the way, she teams up with Keats, played by Chris Pratt, a scavenger in the zone, and the pair soon find themselves facing off against hordes of deformed robots and virtual reality driven mechanical avatars.
“The Electric State” is among the most expensive films ever made, according to media reports that said its budget was $310 million. Netflix did not respond to a question about the movie’s cost.
Despite the steep monetary investment in the Russo brothers film, the film had a 20% positive score out of 20 early reviews collected on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
“Save for a few likable robots, ‘The Electric State’ is charmless and curiously dull. It’s almost as if all the money and tech in the world are not sufficient replacements for imagination,” wrote chief critic Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair.
The film features an array of robot characters, but instead of relying on generic computer-generated robots, the Russos decided to make things more practical for their actors.
“We had a troupe of actors who were very talented actors, but also specifically talented in motion and movement,” Anthony Russo said.
“And they would portray the robots. They would each sort of take a different robot. And they were really critical in terms of creating the energy on set, also developing the personality of the robots, the movement of the robots, etc,” he added.
(Reporting by Rollo Ross and Danielle Broadway; Editing by Mary Milliken and Nick Zieminski)
