The Biggest Differences Between Netflix’s Movie & The Book

Spoilers for “The Electric State” to follow.

There are great film adaptations, like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and there are bad film adaptations, like Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Then there’s 50 feet of crap (as Brad Pitt puts it in “Moneyball”), and then there’s “The Electric State.” Netflix’s allegedly $320 million Russo Brothers extravaganza is a complete disaster from start to finish, filled with unnecessary cameos, embarrassing screenwriting, and set pieces that beg the question: What happened to all that money?

Under normal circumstances, a movie like this would just go down as a simple misfire, and that would be that. But it’s even more upsetting because the book on which it’s based, Simon Stålenhag’s “The Electric State,” is incredible. It’s also still pretty niche despite Stålenhag’s work having become a bit more mainstream over the last several years. That means that for many, the Netflix movie will become the de facto version of this story, and I simply can’t let that stand. It would be like if people only knew about M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender” or “Dragonball Evolution.”

If you’re entirely unfamiliar with Stålenhag, he’s a Swedish digital artist whose books contain a mix of page-spanning, full-color art prints and accompanying narrative text. His stories typically focus on sci-fi worlds based in alternate histories or near futures, which he creates piece by piece with his haunting digital paintings. Isolation, society in decline, and the collision of advanced technology with rural landscapes are all common calling cards in Stålenhag’s work, which began with 2015’s “Tales from the Loop.” With “The Electric State,” however, the Russos and their team completely missed the point of the book. Let’s dive into all the differences and why you should really give Stålenhag’s original work a read instead.

If you were to watch “The Electric State” and then read just five pages of the book, you’d immediately understand how wildly different the two are in tone and focus. The book is a somber portrait of America in collapse, crumbling from the effects of a mechanized civil war and the unchecked cultural influence of virtual reality megacorp Sentre. The closest mainstream comparison I can think of is “The Last of Us,” as both stories follow pairs of characters journeying across a desiccated American landscape, dodging zombie-esque creatures (neurocaster-addicted mobs of people, in the case of Stålenhag’s book), and trying to reach a theoretical safe zone where the special kid in the story can be safe.

Netflix’s version is…decidedly not that. The war in the film was not a civil war (more on that in a second), there’s nothing post-apocalyptic about the world, and there’s none of the lonesome, creepy energy that permeates the art and writing of the book.

Adaptations are, of course, allowed to take liberties and change things around as necessary for the new medium. In this case, however, basically every change made by the production team only makes the story less interesting and more generic. The Russos’ “Electric State” is also wildly confused about its target audience. It occasionally engages with the larger sci-fi ideas from the original book, but mostly eschews them in favor of what I can only describe as “Spy Kids” vibes. If I had to pick a number, I’d say this movie is meant for eight-year-olds, which is just wild when you consider the budget and the source material the Russos are adapting here.

Netflix’s “The Electric State” embraces a regrettably longstanding Hollywood tradition: creating a heavy-handed racism metaphor in a kids’ movie that’s so inert and disengaged from the real world that it loses any actual meaning or purpose. In the film, you see, humans create robots like Mr. Peanut (yes, that Mr. Peanut). The robots then gain sentience through means that are never really explained, and they demand equal rights. War ensues before culminating in a treaty, which results in a prevailing air of preschool bigotry and throw-up-in-your mouth monologuing about how we’re all just people on the inside.

I cannot emphasize enough just how different this is from what happens in the source material (in a bad way). In Stålenhag’s original book, the U.S. is decimated by a second civil war that’s fought by two factions of humans using massive remote-controlled drones. These weapons may be piloted by the neurocaster headsets created by Sentre, but the war is entirely human-vs-human.

I understand that these days, some filmmakers might find it more comfortable to make a quirky sci-fi adventure for kids than engage with the depressing real-world political ramifications of a second American civil war. But when the book you’re adapting is expressly about the damage caused by late-stage capitalism, the overwhelming influence of unchecked tech corporations, environmental collapse, and the military-industrial complex, it’s downright cowardly to throw all of that in the trash for Mr. Peanut.

The war isn’t the only part of “The Electric State” that’s different in the Russos’ Netflix movie. The film also completely alters the storyline involving Michelle and Skip, as played by Millie Bobby Brown and Woody Norman. In this version, the kids are in a horrible car accident that leaves their parents dead. Christopher, aka Skip, is also declared dead, but he’s secretly kept alive and plugged into the Sentre mainframe.

Why? Apparently, his brain is the only thing that makes Sentre’s neurocaster network, er, work. Somehow. Because he’s, like, really smart? Or something. Yeah, actually, I’ve got nothing on this one, it makes zero sense, but Stanley Tucci wants to live in a virtual reality where his mean mother is nice and bakes him Italian pastries, so he has to plug the child into the Matrix … or something.

In the book, Skip and Michelle’s mother dies from medical neglect on behalf of the state — a lack of healthcare for what’s implied to be the physiological effects of heavy neurocaster use. There are actually numerous references to neurocaster users dying after unplugging from the network, but that’s not all. Skip himself is implied to have been conceived by the shared intelligence of the neurocaster’s virtual conglomerate. In other words, the shared consciousness of all the users creates a kind of independent, sentient force, which may or may not digitally impregnate Skip and Michelle’s mother. Michelle thusly travels across the country to find her brother’s real body because a cult of cyber-extremists believe he might be the messiah, and she has to get him off the continent. It’s wild, yes, but it’s also deeply grounded in the core themes of the book: digital dependency, religious extremism, and a public completely abandoned by both federal and corporate overlords.

“The Electric State” was ripe for a screen adaptation, and you don’t have to search far to see what it could have looked like if handled better. In 2020, Prime Video released an eight-episode live-action streaming series adapting Stålenhag’s first book, “Tales from the Loop.” That show is a quiet, gorgeous, visually striking interpretation of its source material that keeps the prevailing themes and energy intact.

While “The Electric State” is higher-concept and would have necessitated a larger budget, it’s easy to envision a movie version that works. There’s so much packed into the book in what’s ultimately a pretty small amount of text — meditations on queerness (yes, Michelle is gay in the book), conversion therapy (the Russos would never), religion (what would Middle America think?), and the material devastation of a capitalist landscape in decline. The portrayal of small-town neurocaster addiction also mirrors the opioid epidemic, with a similar spotlight pointed at the evils of corporate greed. It’s a brilliant, haunting cyberpunk odyssey, and it could have been a deeply resonant movie for our present political moment.

Instead, we got “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 2D” featuring Star-Lord (yep, we’re only now bringing up Chris Pratt’s involvement) in a bad wig. This may not be the worst or the least-faithful adaptation ever made, but when you consider the strength and potential of the source material, it has to be near the top. And Brian Cox, I really need to know how much they paid you to voice that baseball robot.

“The Electric State” is now streaming on Netflix, but, in case it wasn’t crystal clear, I wholly recommend checking out the original book instead.