Holy bananas this movie is having a tough time with the critics. Nearly every review is laying into the film, lambasting how a project with such a massive budget could be so shallow and soulless. Maybe I’m just a simpleton, but here’s my hot take. It’s really not that bad. It could have been a lot more, especially for its reported $320M budget, but as a popcorn flick you can do a lot worse.
Let’s be straight though, this is a very loose adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 narrative art book. I love Stålenhag’s work. Heck, I have one of his art prints on the bookshelf next to me. The same weekend I watched this movie I re-read The Electric State and was reminded how amazing it is. It’s both beautiful and haunting at the same time, a story of a sister’s love for her brother in a world crumbling away.
This is not how I would describe the film adaptation. The skeleton of the story, alongside some of the art book’s retro futuristic imagery, has made itself onscreen, but the tone has significantly shifted in the hands of blockbuster directors The Russo Brothers. We still have a tale of a sister traveling the wastes of the western United States in search of her long lost brother, but now she’s aided by a metalhead smuggler and hunted by the EVIL™ Sentre corporation. Throw in some wisecracking bots and you’ve got the makings of a typical big-budget adventure movie.
If you approach it from that perspective, just sit back and have some fun. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this project, and that certainly buys a lot, especially when you compare this to other splashy Netflix action films like The Union or Atlas which were a lot worse. The Russo Brothers know how to shoot a film, keeping the sequences engaging and the story moving along. The visual effects are top notch, with every bot looking particularly cool and unique. They hired a lot of talented actors, including the ever watchable Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown. Despite all the complaints that Pratt is falling into a rut of similar characters, guess what, this is the kind of roguish funny-man that he is really good at! Some of his wisecracks even extracted genuine laughter from me, which doesn’t often happen in a Netflix film!
Honestly I’m kind of glad I read all the negative reviews ahead of time, because it ensured I didn’t come into the movie with the wrong expectations. The source material could have spawned a much deeper, darker, more twisted movie in the vein of Amazon’s Tales from the Loop show adaptation, but clearly that wasn’t what Netflix was paying for. This is an accessible crowd-pleaser resting on the conceptual frame of high concept sci-fi. Would I love someone like Denis Villeneuve to take their own stab at a Stålenhag project and give us a moody prestige film? You bet your ass, but in the meantime this is still a fun Friday night hang after the kids go to bed.