It could have been another stunning example of Simon Stålenhag’s best illustration work in years. Instead, it’s yet another disastrous Netflix adaptation – this time with the added shame of being the most expensive ever, costing a staggering $320 million. The film is based on the 2018 graphic novel The Electric State by Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag, whose work first gained recognition online before finding success through a 2015 Kickstarter campaign until they eventually caught the attention of the movie industry. His first major publication, Tales From The Loop, was adapted into an anthology TV series, and even films not directly based on his work – like The Creator – have borrowed heavily from his illustrations and concepts.

However, The Electric State sticks closely to Stålenhag’s original 2018 graphic novel. As with all his work, the focus isn’t so much on plot as it is on the world itself – a concept reflected in his art, where human figures are often missing, small, portrayed from the back or relegated to the background. His stories don’t unfold through traditional character-driven arcs but instead through broad landscapes and evocative scenarios where design elements interact. Giant robots and towering technological ruins loom in the distance, juxtaposed against design elements and technologies from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This contrast creates a uniquely melancholic aesthetic and a nostalgic longing for a past that never existed, subtly warped into something eerily dystopian.

The Electric State has a disappointingly conventional plot. Set in a dystopian version of the 1990s, the story takes place after humanity has defeated and confined the rebelling robots it once built as servants, laborers, and even advertising mascots. They have been walled off from society. In their place, a new technology arose, one that allows humans to control mindless robots via a helmet, using them as avatars or vessels for consciousness. Against this backdrop, a girl encounters a robot that has somehow escaped confinement. Through a series of signals, she begins to suspect that her long-lost brother – whom she believed to have died in a car accident along with the rest of their family – may still exist within the machine. Determined to uncover the truth, she embarks on a journey to find his body, only to stumble upon a vast conspiracy. Along the way, she allies with the rebel robots who – in a predictable twist! – turn out to be the real victims.

Stålenhag’s graphic novel was never meant to be a fully developed narrative; it consists of full-page illustrations interspersed with brief paragraphs of text, telling its story more like a book than a comic. In essence, it’s a picture book where the usual balance between image and text is reversed: the images take center stage, while the text plays a supporting role. This structure left ample room to be expanded with a compelling story to match the evocative power of the images. Instead, the Russo brothers ignored this potential, choosing a completely different direction that contradicts the meaning embedded in the design.

The peculiar design of the haunting, rusted, and half-destroyed robots that have formed a small society within their confinement suggests that they are the vestiges of the worst sides of humanity. Some resemble giant peanuts in top hats and vests, remnants of their past as corporate mascots. Others wear grotesque, cartoonish baseball-player faces, revealing their origins as batting practice machines. Many were inspired by cartoon characters and even those built for practical purposes like construction had a design inspired by comics and early 20th-century animation.

They are reflections of a consumerist society that lost its way. Their now-deteriorated advertising appearances, combined with their mistreatment and resulting anger, convey – through design alone – a deep-seated desire for revenge against a world that preys on childhood nostalgia to sell and deceive. These robots were originally created to be reassuring, yet they were ultimately exploited and oppressed.

The Electric State (the film) reduces the robots to a generic minority fighting for the same thing any oppressed minority fights for – the right to exist in peace – simplifying the most compelling discourse. Furthermore, despite being set in the 1990s, the film provides no real narrative or thematic justification for this choice. While it may serve as a tribute to Stålenhag, if the filmmakers had swapped out the costumes at the last minute and set the story in the present or future, nothing of significance would have changed. In other words, the film lacks any meaningful connection to time, nostalgia, or the past.

Yet, that sense of altered nostalgia is the foundation of Stålenhag’s illustrations. His work evokes longing for a past that has been altered or never truly existed, incorporating real-world elements – such as cars, clothing, and everyday objects – and the nostalgia that their design arouses with dystopian imagery to narrate something significant about those years. It is not our past as it truly was, but as the artist reimagined it.

The Russo brothers, on the other hand, seem to have no real vision for the material. The 1990s setting serves little purpose beyond giving Chris Pratt a goofy haircut while delivering a performance more suited to a Jack Black role. So when the film occasionally recreates shots seemingly lifted directly from Stålenhag’s illustrations, it feels almost insulting, an empty pretense that such masterful visual storytelling can fit within such a mortifying framework. Rather than enhancing or supporting the source material, the film strips it of meaning, draining away everything that made it compelling. Worse still, it doesn’t simply ignore Stålenhag’s vision, it actively distorts it, forcing it into a generic narrative about scheming tech moguls plotting against humanity, a rebellion to reclaim lost relationships, and war presented as the only possible solution.

It’s unclear whether the Russos were attempting to emulate District 9, the 2009 film that pioneered a direct yet sophisticated way of using sci-fi to explore issues of marginalization. The Electric State certainly moves in that direction, but it fails to grasp what made District 9 so effective: the shift in perspective. District 9 followed a protagonist who started on one side of the barricade and, through transformation, ended up on the other side, coming to see the world from a new perspective. It ultimately humanized the inhuman. Here, however, the robots – initially framed as dangerous subversives – are little more than caricatures, less human than the toys in Toy Story (which are, in fact, endowed with personalities that operate in unpredictable ways – sometimes aligning with their design, other times defying it entirely.)

Immagine di apertura: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, The Electric State, 2025. Courtesy Netflix