The Electric State Is the Nightmare Haters Claimed Spielberg’s Ready Player One to Be

This post contains spoilers for The Electric State.

Halfway through The Electric State, our hero Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) and her friends are captured by enemy robots and brought to their leader. The robots, who have been formed to look like vaudeville performers, lead Michelle and her friends to the stronghold: a rotted out mall, complete with a food court, pay phones, and a Sears. There they meet the leader of the robot resistance… Mr. Peanut.

As the group makes their way through the mall, the camera focuses on Michelle’s look of wonder at the world around her, accompanied by warm, wondrous notes in Alan Silvestri’s score. For a moment, Michelle feels the pangs of nostalgia, the sense of something lost when robots rose up against their masters in the movie’s fictional 1990, which in turn led to a civil war. In the aftermath of the conflict, robots live in a quarantined wasteland while humans spend most of their time in virtual reality, their bodies wasting below the VR headsets strapped to their faces.

If that sounds familiar, well, that’s because nothing in The Electric State is new or original. And in this particular instance, The Electric State is riffing heavily on Ready Player One, the 2018 Steven Spielberg film that regularly ranks near the bottom of the legendary auteur’s oeuvre.

Yet as hated as Ready Player One is among cineastes and those sick of 1980s Gen-X nostalgia, that definite overload of member berries still looks like a masterpiece next to The Electric State. And that’s not just because the Russo Brothers aren’t Spielberg (who is?). It’s because Ready Player One retains a genuine sense of loss as it rummages through the past, something that The Electric State can’t even fake. In the end, The Electric State is the movie all the detractors claimed Ready Player One to be: the bitter end point of cinema in the IP age.

Going the Wrong Way

Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One also takes place in a near-future where most people live in a virtual reality world called the OASIS after society’s rapid decline. Many of the OASIS’ inhabitants participate in a search for the Golden Easter Egg, a special treasure designed by the virtual reality’s creators James Halliday (Mark Rylance). It’s also a key to the late Halliday’s fortune and control over the OASIS. In other words, it’s a glistening promise of fulfillment and happiness in an empty world.

In one of the movie’s standout set-pieces, contestants have a race to find the next clue leading to the Egg’s location. The sequence is all Spielberg bravura filmmaking, an incredibly chase in which vehicles—including the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the motorbike from Akira, and monster truck Bigfoot—fly down a road filled with explosions, wrecking balls, the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, and of course King Kong. It’s thrilling stuff and never illegible thanks to Spielberg’s understanding of spacial dynamics and the audience’s relationship to the camera.

Delightful as the race is, it always ends in failure. No one can figure out how to get past Kong, who swipes away cars as they reach the finish line. That is until protagonist Parzival (Tye Sheridan) visits the archives of the now-deceased Halliday and watches a conversation between him and the OASIS’ co-founder Osgood Morrow (Simon Pegg). While Morrow insists that technology, culture, and our very lives must move forward, Halliday wistfully wonders why we can’t just “go backwards.”

Spielberg’s camera does one of his signature push ins as Parzival has a realization. That’s the answer. Go backwards. And in the next scene, we watch him go through the race again. But this time he doesn’t continue to barrel forward when he gets to the end. Instead he goes backwards, unlocking the secret to winning the race.

At first glance, the scene seems to be about Parzival being smarter than everyone else, and thus deserving of the status as champion. He has the pop culture knowledge to drive his DeLorean and the gaming smarts to approach the contest in a different way. Thus he is the hero. But as Ready Player One unfolds, it becomes clear that Halliday wasn’t just trying to give a hint about the game. He was trying to warn his players against playing the game altogether, or at least devoting so much of their lives to video games and pop culture ephemera.

Fake Lives, Real Feelings

The quest in Ready Player One, both literally and figuratively, is about how all this pop culture stuff doesn’t really matter. It might be fun for a bit, but it can become cancerous, growing at too great a rate until it overtakes our lives, distracting us from the things that really matter: the human friendships and relationships we live.

That point feels all the more powerful coming from a director like Steven Spielberg, who in many ways is the source of the hyper pop culture that we have today. Although Spielberg limited references to his own work to the inclusion of the Jurassic Park T-Rex and an out-of-focus easter egg (heh) of a Raiders of the Lost Ark poster, his fingerprints are all over the movie, from an homage to his friend Stanley Kubrick with a sequence based on The Shining to the DeLorean from Back to the Future, a movie he produced. Altogether these elements give Ready Player One a deep sadness permeating through all the references. The movie doesn’t praise pop culture. It buries it, ending with an order to shut the whole thing down and go outside.

Contrived as the ending to Ready Player One is, it’s leagues better than the one in The Electric State, which tries a similar move. The Electric State also closes with the hero shutting down the VR network, complete with Michelle broadcasting a speech about how we’re all electric and we’re all connected, and how we all need to live in the real world. It’s incredibly sappy, not just because it’s accompanied by a piano cover of “Wonderwall” by Oasis.

It’s sappy because no part of The Electric State has earned the emotional catharsis it wants. It just hopes that our prior attachments to the ’90s rock song and to the faded ’90s tech that Michelle uses would be enough to make us feel sad that we’re not ’90s kids anymore. As much as the words that Michelle speaks are all about living in the present with other people, the movie is hoping that we’ll live in the past and embrace nostalgia, because that’s the closest thing to an actual emotion that the Russos can muster.

For all of its faults, and it certainly does have them, Ready Player One has the courage to discard the past. It looks back at all of the stuff that came in the wake of Spielberg’s career and criticizes it. Spielberg seems to admit, more than the Cline novel he adapts with the very author, that ephemera isn’t the same as knowledge and connection. The Electric State, by contrast, reminds us just how hard it is to portray that type of self-awareness and human emotion. It reminds us that Ready Player One is a much better movie than we initially realized, and The Electric State is the worst.

The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix.

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