It can take some time to get acclimated to new cinematic worlds. That’s one of the reasons studios are averse to even trying them out in the first place. With the new Netflix movie from brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, the team behind the last two Avengers movies and four Marvel movies overall, that’s about half of the 128-minute running time. But once we’ve acclimated to one of these worlds, we sometimes really immerse ourselves in the vision of the filmmakers. And it turns out, “vision” is not too lofty of a term in this case.

The world of The Electric State has a couple points distinguishing it straight away. For one, this is a period piece, taking place in the early 1990s. But it’s no 1990s any of us ever lived through, even those of us who were alive then. That gets us to our second distinguishing feature, that this is a world that has already lived through several generations of robots as handy companions, robots as malfunctioning killing machines and robots as surrogates of the humans who control them, the last group having long since quelled the threat posed by the second-to-last. But not without a cost, as it has led to most regular citizens being enslaved to an online version of themselves while strapped into large helmets that leave them disconnected from the personal interactions in their lives. Sound familiar?

You might be getting vibes of both Surrogates and Ready Player One, and rightly so – especially since The Electric State shares the latter’s fondness for pop culture. But here is the third distinguishing element for material that, in and of itself, is not new: the design details of both types of robots, or robot-like creatures, we see here. Most of the actual robots are kitschy advertising mascots come to life, but mascots for products that were already decades out of date by the movie’s present tense. Take one particular robot, voice of Woody Harrelson, who is an animatronic Mr. Peanut – the fancy Planters Peanuts mascot with a top hat, cane and monocle, whose actual origins in our culture date back to 1916. He’s also a heroic freedom fighter, but more on that in a moment.

Then there are the more traditional looking badass robots, but these are actually controlled by humans, whose face appears on a small monitor on the snout of their anteater-like head. If you didn’t know you wanted to see, for example, Giancarlo Esposito’s face peering out of the battle droid body of one of these remotely controlled surrogates, then you might not appreciate just how cool it looks from this description alone.

Navigating this world is Michelle (Netflix company woman Millie Bobby Brown), who wades through the detritus of the robot war four years in the past as we catch up to her in 1994. She’s also wading through the personal depression of having lost her family in a car accident, most tragically her younger brother, Chris (Woody Norman). Having won the war, evil tech guy Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci) has put a bounty on the heads of any robots still around, most of whom are innocuous, who have managed to escape the confines of a large internment camp in the American southwest.

Michelle might want to get into that camp. She learns that her brother might not be as dead as she thought, and might be in some way central to Sentra, the fascist organisation that runs the neural network in which everyone participates with blissful complacency. She learns this because a robot crosses paths with her one day who was a character on an old Saturday morning cartoon, and even though it speaks in prewritten phrases – think the Transformer Bumblebee talking in radio blasts – Michelle figures out that this robot may carry the consciousness of her brother.

It wouldn’t be a big adventure movie without Chris Pratt around to Han Solo things up, and he plays John D. Keats, who has his own robot sidekick as well as a business selling illegal firearms. He’ll partner up with Michelle and they will also have help from everyone’s favourite recently anointed Oscar winner, Ke Huy Quan, as a mysterious doctor with his own robot connection.

If this all seems wild in a bad way, it takes about half the movie to decide that it’s not. Adapted from a graphic novel by Simon Stalenhag, The Electric State has an uneasy first half in which we’re unsure if we’re on board with any of this. By the time we learn that the robots were actually hard done by, and Mr. Peanut is among those who are trying to win them their freedom and take down Sentra, we’re well and truly ready for the big third-act battle scene the Russos have shown they can give us in … well, every Marvel movie they’ve made. When the combatants are a rusty old baseball mascot who shoots baseballs and a piano player out of an old west themed restaurant, we realise this has all come together in an extremely satisfying way.

Although Pratt and Brown are big stars, they aren’t key to why The Electric State works. There’s a retrofuturist vibe shooting through this movie that develops its own giddy vibe as it goes, and the thing just becomes a wonder to look at. It doesn’t hurt that it’s got some handy themes with a little too much currency, involving fascists anesthetising the public while getting to do whatever they want, embodied by Tucci in prime superior asshole form. Meanwhile, the movie really commits to its time period, with frizzy hair to spare and plenty of excellently used period pop music (some of which appear in orchestral versions as the score). That this world developed the way it did with robots and counter robots and a big war between them, while Bill Clinton still became president and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch still released “Good Vibrations,” is enough of a hoot not to make us nitpick too much.

We get few enough examples of movies with a vigorous sense of the new and original, that it’s worth celebrating them when they appear, especially as they gain their footing with increasing momentum. The Electric State does not do anything distinct as a narrative, of course, and it has its wobbly bits. But given that there are only supposed to be six basic stories in the history of storytelling, might as well get behind the one where a peanut mascot with a monocle does battle with Gus Fring’s face on a black and white TV monitor atop a mech suit.

 

The Electric State is currently streaming on Netflix.