Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt Face a Robot Uprising in ‘The Electric State’ (2024)

Imagine a future in ruins. But it’s actually not the future—this story takes place in 1994, in the aftermath of a battle between humanity and artificial intelligence that ended in a devastating stalemate. The people who died were buried; the automatons who were destroyed rust away where they fell. The defeated robots have been banished to an “exclusion zone” in the southwestern desert, while human society attempts to rebuild without the help of the mechanical beings it created.

That’s the backdrop of The Electric State, the sprawling new adventure film from Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo. The project combines a coming-of-age road trip comedy with philosophical musings about what makes someone (or something) actually alive. “You can recognize humanity in technology, and you can recognize inhumanity in humans,” Anthony Russo says for this exclusive first look. “Both things are possible. That’s the struggle.”

After wrapping their decade-long tour of duty on Marvel’s biggest superhero team-ups, the brothers directed the 2021 crime drama Cherry and the 2022 assassin thriller The Gray Man, in addition to producing numerous other projects (including the Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once). This past summer, they stunned fans by announcing a comeback to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. with them—though this time he will play the villain Doctor Doom. They weren’t exactly working on small canvases before, but the brothers say The Electric State, debuting on Netflix in early 2025, reinvigorated their desire to make vast fantasy epics again. “This was unintentional as of several months ago, but this movie is actually a remarkable sort of bridge for us back to that,” Anthony says. “It’s an interesting prelude to returning to Marvel and trying to continue that story forward.”

The Electric State stars Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a young woman searching for a lost brother she once believed dead. As the story begins, he seems to have tracked her down through a remote-controlled bot that looks like a life-sized tin-toy version of his favorite sci-fi hero, Kid Cosmo (an original creation for this story, although he has retro vibes). The robot can only speak in catchphrases, but he’s trying to guide her to his real-life location. Though he looks and sounds like a machine, within this apparent drone she sees the soul of a sibling she thought was gone forever.

Chris Pratt costars as Keats, a veteran of the war who became a long haul trucker, engaged in a smuggling operation with one of his former enemies—a construction machine named Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) who’s like a Russian nesting doll, able to hop into increasingly various sized versions of himself. These two are the only ones who can help Michelle venture through hostile territory and track down the missing boy, while also solving the mystery of why he was kidnapped in the first place.

Brown’s Michelle is a typical Gen X grunge girl of the ’90s era, rough around the edges and battered by the loss of her entire family, whom she was told were all killed in a car accident. The Stranger Things actor says she tried to make the character resilient, but the Russos urged her not to go too far. “The note that I would always get is, she’s still human,” Brown says. “She’s rebellious and yes, she doesn’t want to follow the rules and she’s incredibly hurt because she’s dealing with a lot of grief. But she’s not invincible.”

The 20-year-old, who began playing the psychic powerhouse Eleven on Stranger Things when she herself was only 11, said she drew on her own experiences of trying to appear tough even when she didn’t feel that way. “We’re technically both the same age, so I feel like it was just: What are moments that I wouldn’t show my weakness? What are moments that I would? And I just played with that,” she says. “I really want her to show that she’s made of stone because I want that to be the perception of who she is. But actually, as you get to know her, she softens and she warms up. And I tried to implement as much of my own experiences into her as possible.”

At this point in The Electric State’s alternate history, humanity has won the war but still lost its way. Most people’s lives are ruled by the helmet-like digital devices they use to escape into a virtual fantasyland. Elsewhere, the robot exiles are struggling in a different direction, embittered by their lack of rights, desperate to prove their individuality and free will. They’re led by…. Mr. Peanut. Yes, the Planters mascot. He’s a sentient device once created for marketing purposes who evolved into a battle-weary elder statesman, guiding his flock of fellow machines, most of whom were similarly designed to have cartoon exteriors while being programmed with actual minds, emotions, and a strong survival instinct.

Mr. Peanut is voiced by Woody Harrelson, and beneath the hard exterior is a touch of a certain ex-president who famously grew up on a Georgia peanut farm. “We did fashion a folksy vibe off of Jimmy Carter,” Anthony Russo says. The mechanized revolutionary also shares a tragic aspect with Carter, a one-term president who was admired for his thoughtfulness but historically struggled to be effective. “He almost has this bit of a shared history with Carter in the sense of he was more concerned with the ideals than the practicality, and things didn’t work as well as he hoped,” Joe Russo says.

“It could be an assaultive theme if the story were set in the present day,” Joe Russo says. “Sometimes we find that when you couch it in a fable, and you remove it from its immediacy, you can create space for people to process it differently. What Simon Stalenhag did that was so clever is that humans are using technology to dehumanize themselves, and he tells a story about technology that aspires to become human. At what point do they cross, and at what point does the technology become more human than the humans?”

If that sounds heavy, the brothers are well aware. That’s why The Electric State walks a tightrope between speculative sci-fi and old-fashioned buddy comedy. It’s also why the robots are typically depicted as silly, rickety, or absurd beings who play on the audience’s sympathies rather than as blood-curdling, unstoppable Terminator juggernauts. “The intent was to create complex feelings for you, where it’s both funny and tragic at the same time,” Joe Russo says. “The mythology behind the film is that robots were created in this world to be pleasing to the eye, to feel non-threatening, to make you love them. To make you smile, to sell you things, to take care of you. So they have a cartoonish aspect to them by design in the movie.”

The Russos acknowledged that getting the rights to Harrelson’s character took some negotiating, since Planters executives at parent company Hormel Foods weren’t immediately amenable to their corporate icon being depicted as the leader of an insurgency. “We pursued it for a long time, and it was a process for the Hormel folks to come around to it, but eventually they did,” Anthony says. “It took a lot of middlemen and conversations through middlemen about what we were trying to do, and it eventually all worked out.”

“They gave us creative reign,” Joe adds. “It was a delicate balance because you don’t want to overwhelm the movie with commercialism or a level of reality that pulls you out of the fable, but we felt like Mr. Peanut fit the tone of the design of the other robots, and we thought it funny that he was essentially their Atticus Finch. The most well-spoken and thoughtful of the robots is a peanut with a cane and a top hat.”

Other mechs taking center stage in the story include Jenny Slate voicing Penny Pal, a cheerful mail robot, and Brian Cox voicing Popfly, a malfunctioning baseball-pitching machine who has perhaps taken one too many line drives to his central processing unit. Although Michelle’s missing brother is played by actor Woody Norman in human form, his Cosmo robot avatar is voiced by Alan Tudyk, spouting prerecorded aphorisms from the hit animated series that inspired the robot.

Rounding out the human cast is Everything Everywhere Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan as Dr. Amherst, a key figure in the odyssey to locate the lost boy; Stanley Tucci as Ethan Skate, a tech entrepreneur whose addictive virtual reality devices have inadvertently paralyzed humanity; and Giancarlo Esposito as Colonel Bradbury, a hero of the robopocalypse who now uses a walking drone commando to remotely hunt and kill artificial intelligence machines who stray across the border.

Esposito’s character can’t give up the fight and is holding onto his hatred of robots even while spending most of his time inhabiting a machine for his patrols. It’s a contrast to Pratt’s character, another former soldier who has let go of his animosity—though he still bickers with his mechanical pal Herman like an old married couple.

“There’s a level of humanity that’s lost in war,” Pratt says. “You almost have to look at your enemy as a robot, as some devious killing machine. It’s you or them.”

But there’s also a phenomenon after the fighting ceases in which even those who once desperately tried to destroy each other suddenly change perspective. “Once the war is over and the decision-makers have decided to sign a truce, I think it’s very easy to recognize yourself in the soldiers that you’re fighting against,” the actor says. That’s what happens to Keats and Herman. “There’s lots of examples in the film of using robots to sneak humanity into war,” Pratt says.

While almost all of the robots in The Electric State were generated digitally, the characters did have human stand-ins for most of the scenes. The one playing Herman’s R2-D2-sized form happened to be someone who also had tried to kill Pratt before.

Martin Klebba, the four-foot actor best known for playing one of Jack Sparrow’s surly crewmates in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, had previously stood in for a flying Dimorphodon dinosaur who tackled Pratt and tried to eviscerate him in Jurassic World. The stunt fight in that case got more intense than either of them expected.

“He’s standing on my chest in a spandex suit, and it’s this moment where this raptor bird-thing is biting at my face and I throw it off. And then Bryce Dallas Howard comes up and hits it with the butt of the gun and we kiss,” Pratt recalls. “So right before that moment, I have my hands around his neck and they say, ‘Action!’ And he leans his weight into me and he starts snarling and barking and trying to bite my face. It was legitimately terrifying. And I chucked him the way I was supposed to do. He lands on his head, fully cracks his head open, gets blood everywhere. I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, dude!’ He’s like, ‘It’s all good. I’m a stunt man!’ He gets a bandage on his head, jumps right back up on my chest and we do another take.”

Pratt says he based Keats on another long-ago friend from his childhood, a next-door neighbor who was a few years older, and—at least to seven-year-old Pratt—significantly cooler. “This was probably ’86? MTV was first coming out, and David Lee Roth was huge,” Pratt says. “I saw David Lee Roth on MTV, and I was like, ‘Oh—that’s my neighbor.’ He had long flowing hair, he played electric guitar, he wore zebra-stripe stretch pants and jumped on a mini trampoline in the backyard. He was absolutely the coolest fucking dude I’ve ever met at that point in my seven years of experience.”

The actor recently tried to locate this childhood idol, but discovered he had since passed away. Nevertheless, Pratt’s Electric State performance stands as a tribute. “I hadn’t spoken to him in 35 years. But he was always an iconic figure in my life and I wanted to loosely base the character on him, on this guy who would’ve been from the ’80s. Because, of course, the film takes place in an alternate version of the ’90s,” Pratt says. “I wanted to have long hair. I had the music and the rings, and the necklaces and the key chain, and all this stuff. I tried to lead with my stomach when I walked. It was a little bit of a bowlegged thing, and I think that was like him.”

It may not be who you want in your foxhole when the robots turn homicidal, but there’s no denying the sheer humanity of a guy like that.

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