This was a…watch. It’s okay at first. CGI isn’t too bad, civilization tale. It’s just, mediocre really. Then the third act comes where all that mediocrity collapses, and it has nothing to it at all because it failed to give you compelling characters or a good story in every way.

But..aside from that with its below average story and filmmaking technicalities, there are some quite irritating things in the way it portrays this world as well as AI.

It tries to sell you on this futuristic 1995, oooh AI everywhere can you believe it! But the AI isn’t even more advanced than modern AI that we have today. I’m not just saying that because ChatGPT 4.5 passed the Turing Test but also because it acts quite dated rather than knowledgeable, like things you’d see in Star Trek (1966 – 1969). How do you, in 2022 (production start date of this movie)..create a movie showing a futuristic 1995 that is far less advanced than the futuristic 1997 portrayed in The Terminator (1982)? I genuinely want to know. Frankly it would be even worse if this movie was released in 2027, because it would have been part produced during a post-AI passing the Turing test world.

Additionally, the discourse over AI is so dated. The public figures sound nothing like any pro-AI people or any AI-skeptics. Now, this last part perhaps the past two years and a bit since the film began there has been nothing. Perhaps it would’ve been better in 2022 when production of the movie began that this is when the movie comes out, rather than in a world full of artificial intelligence everywhere you go now. Frankly the proper movie could be being made right now, and it comes out in 2026 when…we have our own Kelex-like robots working for us and the discourse is completely something else. So I would not use this last part against it.

The graphic novel is probably a lot better than this, and even if 1:1 the Russos could’ve taken liberties to innovate; adaptations don’t have to copy and paste, especially here. Being released in a world where this is such a heavy topic, it got unlucky. But with a little bit of thinking..a little bit of research…could’ve really innovated properly.

Conclusion

★

All in all, The Electric State (2025) is a quite below average movie that borders on the cliche not just by the standards of today and how AI is in our world today but by the standards of the 80s where movies like The Terminator (1982) were being released.