I was looking for something to watch and gave this new Netflix movie a shot. It’s by the Russo brothers which probably explains the Star studded cast.
It’s not very good in the sense that it is filled with cliches and bad dialogue but I did appreciate that it took some big swings by presenting a bunch a really silly stuff with a straight face.
Anyone else see it?
We watched it yesterday. It was an interesting and fun-weird enough movie if it existed on its own. I feel like it’s a bit too wacky-comic of a take on the source material. There’s a deep melancholy in Stålenhag’s work that the movie really only managed to touch upon briefly in a few places.
I spent the whole film wondering where the $320 million budget went. It sure isn’t on the screen.
Apparently 20 million of it went to Chris Pratt for him to reprise his Star Lord role in all but name.
I haven’t seen it but I was just reading today:
I read a bunch of reviews that said how awful it was, so I watched it to see if the critics were right. It was not awful. I enjoyed it as a fun sci-fi road trip with some neat CGI effects.
I read a similarly scathing article on the BBC web site:
I thought it was a fine popcorn movie (although I found Giancarlo Esposito’s character didn’t make much sense).
Looked like a decent enough brainless popcorn flick last Saturday night, so my wife and I tried watching it. I, going in with low expectations, was tolerating it at a solid level of ‘meh’, but my wife had to bail 22 minutes in. So we switched to something else. Maybe I’ll finish it on my own one night when I’m up late and bored.
The writer of this AV Club review is clearly a Stålenhag fan who definitely agrees with you:
Simon Stålenhag’s The Electric State is a haunting, melancholy vision of a dystopian 1990s that exists not so far from our present.
[…]
None of that is found in directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s latest Netflix offering.
[…]
…the would-be action-adventure flick is creatively bankrupt. There’s no room for the bruising world-building Stålenhag created with his words and painterly landscapes. Instead, the Russo brothers crafted a crass commercialist product that both misunderstands and betrays its source material.
…now I kind of want to read the book.
I want to like it. I really do. There’s just something off about it I can’t put my finger on. It’s like you mixed all the ingredients for a cake, did all the bits properly, yet still managed to mess it up and it tastes bad.
It’s not awful. Just…not sure…
I agree…where did $320 million go?
This.
Also, everything looked so dirty, which is not how the source material looks. It’s always very clean landscapes - with anomalous tech bits. Not rubbish all strewn around everywhere, which was the film’s aesthetic.
Still, I liked it OK. I have very low expectations of filmed sci fi, and it exceeded those well enough.
As adaptations of Stålenhag’s work go, I thought Tales From the Loop better embodied the vibe.
I watched it the other day and enjoyed it. Compared to the most recent Star Trek movie, Section 31, it was Gone With the Wind.
This came quick.
I thought it was OK. It’s a family film, through and through.
That’s exactly how I ended up feeling. I think it would’ve been difficult to do a faithful film adaptation of Stålenhag’s graphic novel, which really works on mood much more than on plot (and does so masterfully), but which doesn’t really suit itself to big-budget blockbuster. You can do something like that in a kinda low-key series format, but it’s a difficult sell to a wider audience. So in that respect, most of the choices made worked well enough, I thought.
Although I did miss the hauntology evoked by the images in the graphic novel, a sort of longing for a future that never was and yet, is already gone. But no idea how you could translate that to film.