Yes, I am well aware that the sentence in the title can be applied to any film based on a literary original. And yes, I know that directors have the right to their own vision, that a film adaptation does not always have to be a verbatim repetition of the original source, and blah, blah, blah. But, in the case of The Electric State by the supposedly famous Russo brothers, the difference is so striking...
| Title | The Electric State |
| Genre | sci-fi, action |
| Directors | Anthony and Joe Russo |
| Starring | Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci, Jason Alexander, Giancarlo Esposito, Woody Norman, Martin Klebba and others |
| Studios | AGBO, Netflix |
| Timing | 2 hours 08 minutes |
| Year | 2025 |
| Link | IMDb |
Perhaps I should have left The Electric State ropes in oblivion somewhere in the jungle of Netflix's endless catalog of bad movies, but... I decided that this failed film adaptation is a good opportunity to talk about the work of the artist, writer, composer and game designer Simon Stalenhag, whose book this film is based on.
Simon Stalenhag is a Swedish digital artist, writer, musician, and game designer who is fond of retrofuturism and creates touching graphic stories that can be called neither books nor comics, nor even graphic novels. Rather, they are a kind of art book with notes in the margins that create the appropriate mood and tell a usually very melancholic, viscous and poignant fantasy story with a sad ending. Stolenhagen's books can be considered a kind of sci-fi mood books. It is very pleasant to leaf through them slowly, looking at the illustrations, and some chapters here contain only illustrations, without text, reading a small explanatory text and trying to speculate about what the author deliberately keeps silent about.
The works of Simon Stalenhag are primarily food for the mind and imagination. Despite the general sad mood and sometimes even tragic endings, they somehow calm and, if you will, even comfort.
Stalenhag's books are very difficult, almost impossible to film, and in any case, the film adaptation will not have a plot similarity to the original, because Stolenhagen's works usually do not have a clearly defined plot. Although, for example, The Electric State is a complete story with a beginning and an end, a sad road book through the territory of America of the future, which is dying of its own indifference to itself.
So, even though The Electric State has a clear plot, the authors of The Electric State have managed to alter it so much that it is not just different from the original, it contradicts it. And, of course, the Russo brothers have left nothing of the sad, melancholic mood of the quiet end of the world that Stalenhag depicts. Instead, we have a variation on the Independence Day theme with a confrontation between good robots and evil humans, instead of a war between humans and aliens. Hell, there's even a hero president sneaking into the enemy's lair.
But if everything in Independence Day was so bad that it was good, then the same cannot be said about The Electric State by the Russo brothers. The famous directors, who spent an incredible $320 million on the film (yes, it's the most expensive Netflix movie ever!), turned out an absolutely embarrassing nothingness. As in the case of Independence Day, you can probably watch the movie once and even get some morbid pleasure from it, but it is really just embarrassing.
Almost all of the good things about The Electric State are the one-to-one reproductions of several illustrations from Simon Stallings' book and the robot designs, both those of Stalenhag and those created specifically for the film.
The eminent actors invited to play in The Electric State don't even try, except for Stanley Tucci and Giancarlo Esposito, but the latter's role doesn't even involve any outstanding acting. Chris Pratt looks the worst in the movie, he was given the role of a jester and he didn't even handle it well. Millie Bobby Brown is an outright miscast. With all due respect to her work in Stranger Things, especially in the first seasons, in all the latest movies she plays the same role with the same facial expression, and it's not outstanding acting at all, if we can even talk about acting here. Still, the silent heroine of the book, who describes in a somewhat detached way what she experienced before the events of the book and what she sees during her trip to America, looks much more coherent and interesting than the slightly too talkative image from the movie.
As I said before, Simon Stalenhag books are very difficult to adapt, but if the adaptation authors have the talent and desire, it is possible. As it happened in the case of the Amazon series Tales from the Loop (2020). Yes, its plot is very different from the story of Stalenhag's books Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood, but it retains the main idea, the same mysterious Loop, and almost perfectly conveys the nostalgic and melancholic mood of Stollenhagen's works. I highly recommend watching this series.
And, of course, I highly recommend all of Simon Stalenhag's fiction/literary works. As of now, there are five books by him: Tales from the Loop (2014), Things from the Flood (2016), The Electric State (2018), The Labyrinth (2020), and Swedish Machines (2025). All of Stolenhagen's books were funded by Kickstarter. As of now, only the first book, Tales from the Loop, has been published in Ukrainian by Vydavnytstvo. It is not yet known whether other works by the author are planned to be translated, but English-language versions are available for sale.
In addition to texts and illustrations, Simon Stalenhag creates... electric music for his own works. The ambient albums Music for DOS, The Electric State, Music for Satanic Children and The Labyrinth are available on streaming services - Spotify, YouTube Music.
But that's not all. There is also a board role-playing game based on Tales from the Loop, which is compared to Stranger Things in terms of vibe.
Back to the Netflix movie. If you're already familiar with Simon Stalenhag's work, it's best to skip The Electric State. If you're not, it's better to watch the movie first, and then move on to the books. Or go straight to the books, because as I said at the beginning, books are better, books are almost always better.