Note: The phrase “sad weirdos” is aimed, with love, at fellow users of Letterboxd, where this review was originally published.

I know I’m supposed to shit on this movie with the rest of you sad weirdos who watch things we hate for two straight hours.

And sure, you could have done much better giving Neal Blomkamp $10 million and a long weekend to make this.

And sure, I could have written better dialogue, especially for the sibling interactions at the supposed heart of the movie, on an all-night instant coffee bender.

And sure, it was a mistake to give Chris Pratt the only direction he obviously received, which was “Starlord, but less good.”

And sure, hiring Giancarlo Esposito and Colman Domingo to be low-res faces was a profound waste of profound talents.

But, I am not sorry to say, I enjoyed the movie. It could have, should have, been much, much, much better, given the quiet, transcendent horror-nostalgia of the source material. But as stuff-I-watched-while-folding-laundry goes, it could very easily have been worse.

A movie poster for 2025 Netflix film The Electric State. The image features a young woman and a man standing on top of an old red Volkswagen van in a desert-like setting during sunset. A large, round-headed robot with glowing red eyes sits next to the van, resting one hand on the ground. A smaller, yellow robot with a cartoonish face is perched on the van’s hood. The movie title, The Electric State, is displayed in bold, metallic letters at the top, with wires extending from the text. The background features a vast landscape with a distant bridge and industrial structures.

Also published at: Letterboxd and Trakt