“His animatronics became sentient at some point and were commercialized and sold and moved into a service industry role,” director Joe Russo tells us. “People bought them with their very shiny pleasing appearance, and then those sentient robots got angry with us and felt mistreated and that is where the post-war dystopia came from.”
Of course, there is a very good reason that Stanley Tucci doesn’t remember any of that—it never happened. Russo is describing the chain of events that led to the alternate 1990s of his and Anthony Russo’s new movie, The Electric State, coming to Netflix next year.
Signs of the Times
The film is a story of sentient robots and virtual reality systems, and yet, based on the work of retrofuturist artist and writer Simon Stålenhag, it is grounded firmly in an imaginary version of 30 years ago.
“The ’90s is the right period for what the story was,” says Russo. You’re starting to get into compact discs and DVDs, the advent of cell phones, you’re starting to get into the interconnected era, and so it felt like the right period for the tech to plausibly sit in this fantasy space.”
The alternate-history setting also helped prevent the story from feeling too preachy. “Period is really important when you’re talking about topical themes because everyone hears every day how bad their phones are for them, how bad screentime is for them, and we don’t want to shove that down their throat,” Russo explains.
This theme was one of the things that attracted Tucci to the project in the first place. “I’m fascinated by technology because I don’t know anything about it, and I’m very bad at using it,” he says. “But how it has changed over my lifetime is so significant, and we are, at times, ruled by it, which is a frightening thing.”
