The snarkiest and most savage reviews of Millie Bobby Brown’s new Netflix movie The Electric State

The new movie The Electric State is popping off on Netflix… but the reviews tell a very different story. The film currently has a whopping 15 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes. Netflix reportedly spent $320 million on this project. Yikes.

In The Electric State, Millie Bobby Brown stars as an orphaned teenager in an alternate version of the 1990s filled with robots. For real. Chris Pratt is also in it, naturally. Here’s a round-up of the most brutal reviews for The Electric State.

Wait, there was meant to be a plot?!

I don’t think The Electric State will will any awards for creativity. Lots of critics complained the plot was too similar to other sci-fi movies, or was just plain dull.

“It’s neither funny nor exciting,”  said a critic in The Hollywood Reporter, “Like so many streaming originals, The Electric State seems less a real movie than an imitation of one.”

Nadine Whitney wrote in The Curb: “Who cares? The cheque is in the bank and the audience’s partial attention has cashed it. The Electric State isn’t a movie, it’s an experiment conducted on the audience to determine how much dross they’ll tolerate.”

Peter Bradshaw said:  “There’s no soul, no originality, just a great big multicolour wedge of digital content.”

This pic does not fill me with enthusiasm for the film
(Image via Netflix)

The film is based on a popular 2018 graphic novel. Lots of critics were unimpressed with how much the film changed the source material. In the book, the heroine Michelle is a lesbian and suffers from brain damage. In the film, Michelle is a much more generic action hero.

Most Read

MAFS Australia 2025 bride Jacqui *finally* explains what her mysterious corporate job actually is

Adolescence director breaks down the ending’s secret meaning and it’s utterly heartbreaking

MAFS Australia 2025 bride launches police investigation against groom in ‘revenge porn’ scandal

Kevin Maher said in The Times: “If you ever need a chilling illustration of Hollywood’s crippling fear of originality just look at how screenwriters and regular Russo collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have gutted the Stalenhag book.

He continued, “Glimpses of far more interesting material from the novella — mostly about the dehumanising aims of big tech — that perhaps unsurprisingly didn’t end up in a Netflix film.”

Millie Bobby Brown’s performance was not exactly praised

The New York Times compared her to “a stunned deer in headlights.” A ScreenRant writer was “confused” by her American accent.

“Eventually an actor has to commence acting,” said the Sunday Times, “Brown, on the basis of her previous movies and certainly from the stilted shapes that she throws in this soulless sci-fi dud, seems profoundly ill-equipped in that one crucial department. She can pout and stare, and her cheek can hold, as it does here, a single glycerine tear to signify emotion. But honest, expressive, big screen acting?”

Millie Bobbie Brown is gorgeous but this is objectively not her best hairstyle
(Image via Netflix)

Other critics complained her performance was just rehashing her work in the Godzilla films and as Eleven in Stranger Things. To be fair, it’s not Millie Bobby Brown’s fault that Hollywood keeps casting her in the same types of roles.

Nobody understands why Netflix spent so much money on it

“While it looks like it cost a fortune, it feels like pennies were spent on the story,” says the review in City AM, “A soulless trudge of a sci-fi road-movie, anything interesting is avoided in favour of limp gags and CGI ornaments. Is it the most depressing category of filmmaking: a movie designed to be empty other than the occasional moments of spectacle that make you look up from your phone.”

The Electric State is on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Feature image via Netflix.