The Russo Brothers, Marvel’s prodigal sons, are returning to the MCU for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, and they’re bringing a couple of actors back for the ride. But before they can clock back into the Avengers movie machine, they have one more non-franchise movie left to release: The Electric State, a dystopian sci-fi road trip adventure starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, based on Simon Stålenhag’s book.
Netflix recently revealed the movie’s first full trailer, which focuses on how our characters ended up where they are. Billionaire Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) narrates the tale of how AI-powered sentient robots rose up against humans, but were defeated and restricted to a robot ghetto known as the Electric State. Check out the full trailer below.
The Electric State is the story of Michelle (Brown), a young woman looking for her lost brother, who this trailer gives us a glimpse of. When a robot approaches her with knowledge of him, she’s convinced he can be found within the Electric State, and ropes in a man named Keats (Pratt) to help her.
But this trailer’s focus on Ethan Skate is especially interesting. He plays a tech billionaire, but not your typical one. Instead of the futuristic AI-embracing tech-bros of today, Skate is much more suspicious of robots. When an interviewer mentions that he’s never owned one, he says, “I never trusted them. They’re not us.”
Still, you can expect a villainous turn. “Those guys, they are incredibly charming, although they then become uncharming later,” Tucci told Den of Geek. “They’re almost sociopathic in their ability to win people over and convince people that what they need to do is what they need them to do.”
The Electric State doesn’t hit Netflix for a few more months, but this is a welcome look at the robot uprising that began its adventure and is still rippling throughout its society. In the graphic novel, this was shown through creepily sparse images of decaying robots. The movie has the luxury of flashbacks, like the one we see of a robot throwing a car at a building. The two may be quite different, but both show us glimpses into the minds of robots, be they friends or foes.
