Before they’re swallowed by the Marvel wormhole yet again with Avengers: Doomsday, Joe and Anthony Russo continue to belt out big-budget action flicks for the small screen. Much like their 2022 action-thriller The Gray Man, The Electric State is a Netflix offering, albeit one with even more noughts on the budget.
What is The Electric State about?
The sci-fi-adventure-comedy boasts Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt as a duo driving through a reimagined ’90s America. In this alternate dystopia, robots have rejected slavery and rebelled against humanity, only to be banished to a desert prison – aka ‘the Electric State’.
Loosely inspired by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel, this futurescape is dust-caked like a Fallout game and radiantly awe-inducing like a Spielberg sci-fi.
Production designers Dennis Gassner (Blade Runner 2049) and Richard L Johnson (Pacific Rim) come up with a retro-futuristic style that’s both nostalgically Y2K-coded and disconcertingly Elon Musk-adjacent. While the film might stray away from Stålenhag’s darker designs, The Electric State builds a fluid and kaleidoscopic world that offers a Mr. Peanut robot, Ke Huy Quan fighting drones at a haunted house carnival, and metaverse landscapes resembling Windows XP wallpaper.
Despite the CGI-ness of it all, The Electric State did make use of real-world locations albeit with some movie magic. Hop into Chris Pratt’s retro Volkswagen van and put on some ’90s tunes while we take a tour.
Where was Electric State filmed?
The Russos started principal photography in October 2022 in Atlanta and finally wrapped up in early February 2023 after a hiatus. This was followed by a few reshoots in 2024 from March 20 to April 5.
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta served as the backdrop for most of the film’s suburban settings, reflecting a realistic world occasionally adorned with cyberpunk lights and towers. The Russo brothers are no stranger to the Georgia city, having previously filmed Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame at Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios and downtown areas.
A notable landmark in the film is a pulpy theme park, complete with a haunted mansion, Tesla coils, and speakers blasting Marky Mark’s Good Vibrations. This carnival turns into a battleground when Giancarlo Esposito's militaristic villain leads human-controlled android soldiers against our human heroes. Gassner reveals that the abandoned park was ‘designed and built in a parking lot in Atlanta’.
Lake Acworth, Georgia
While Atlanta provided the suburban foundation, Lake Acworth offered a natural contrast for the film's emotional flashbacks. The artificial beach harbours a white sand beach that appears in tragic flashback sequences. Millie Bobby Brown’s teenage heroine Michelle remembers running on the sand with her deceased brother Christopher (newcomer Woody Norman). It’s at the shore of Lake Ackworth where the siblings had some good, old outdoor fun. At least, until the whole robot takeover thing.
North DeKalb Mall, Georgia
As Michelle teams up with Chris Pratt’s long-haired soldier-turned-drifter Keats, they come across a robot colony in another geographic deep cut in Georgia. This is the North DeKalb Mall in North Decatur, a single-level shopping mall from 1965 that once housed 85 stores. With most of the mall demolished shortly after filming in the summer of 2024, only an off-price department store and an AMC multiplex remain.
Filming took place right before the mall’s demolition, timing that Gassner describes as a ‘gift from the movie gods’. ‘The fact that they were going to demolish it anyway gave us tremendous latitude,’ he notes.
The mall doubles as a robotic safe haven in The Electric State when the Woody Harrelson-voiced Mr Peanut unites the rusty survivors of the human-vs-robot war. While the mall offers some moments of peace, it bears witness to another high-stakes battle between Mr Peanut’s bots and their human oppressors.
Even before its demolished makeover, the North DeKalb's dead and desolate ambiance was ideal for many apocalyptic scenarios. Zombieland: Double Tap, Loki, and Cobra Kai are some of the high-profile projects filmed at this spot.
Utah and New Mexico, USA
Some of the desert scenes also incorporated footage from the sun-soaked valleys and mountains Utah and New Mexico, which were later composited together with Atlantan locations like the North DeKalb Mall.
Many other spots throughout the movie were similarly achieved with a hybrid approach: combining sets with real-world locations and blending multiple background elements into a unified setting.
For instance, Chris Pratt’s Keats and his robot friend Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) store the goods of their dodgy eBay-like business in an underground lair. This hideout is where Pratt and Brown’s protagonists first meet, as they run past racks of board games, hop on to a rusty mine cart, and then leap out to the vast expanse of a desert.
‘This lair was a quarry in Atlanta that we interfaced with an interior set,’ explains Gassner. ‘For the exterior, we relied on the same quarry but we also connected it with the Utah and New Mexico locations. The sets were like connecting tissues.’
Seattle, Washington
The Electric State’s trailer opens with an aerial shot of the Space Needle, a futuristic landmark synonymous with Seattle. This naturally raised speculation around the Washington city being a potential location in the film. And while our heroes do prepare for a climactic third-act battle on a field in Seattle, Gassner yet again points his finger to Atlanta.
Seattle still made its way into the film, but as Gassner puts it, ‘only as plates’. For those unacquainted with production design lingo, plates are visuals that are used as background shots or composited elements (much like the Utah and New Mexico footage). The Electric State similarly used many other global landmarks as plates with some CGI trickery. Archival footage depicts a human-robot war at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe while machine-controlling towers stand tall alongside the Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, and Mumbai’s Gateway of India.
When is The Electric State released?
It lands on Netflix worldwide on Friday, March 14.
The Electric State soundtrack: the full tracklist for the Netflix sci-fi adventure.