The Electric State (2025) A Review

The name of this movie has more than one meaning to it. The first is obvious as it involves robots who have evolved into life forms. The other not so obvious is that all we are in our minds is electrical impulses. There is the idea that when we pass on, that electricity transcends to another state of being and what we are lives on after the body is gone. This is stated, in part, near the start of the movie but is easy to miss.

I’m going to do this review in text, because the movie got to me enough, that I may get emotional on video and start leaking. It was (at least to me) deeply moving and a vision of a possible reality not too long off from now. It is also a vision of what might be an ethical dilemma in the future, where we ignore very evil things happening so we can enjoy our lives more.

The start is just a back story and a lead into the ending emotionally speaking. We jump soon after to a girl in high school who refuses to use the technology, they want her to use to learn with as it alters her perception of reality in her mind.

We soon learn that her entire family is dead, and that she is living in a sort of abusive state with a state-appointed care giver. It’s obvious that he is in it just for the money. The care giver is, like most people on earth, addicted to the artificial reality that the device they all use grants them. This allows them to do work with a robot body interfaced to the device and at the same time be in a pleasant artificial reality. We see that this is causing a great deal of issues with humanity.

She encounters a robot who has broken out of the prison they where all put after a war for independence that exacted a great toll on the robots and to a lesser extent humanity. The robot tells her, he is her brother whose body is being kept somewhere else.

It takes some doing but the robots and the girl and a smuggler end up fighting for the freedom of the boy. I won’t tell you the ending, but you have to watch to the last moment and in the reflection of some water, it is the actual outcome of the movie that most people will never notice. BTW, the robots are fighting for actual freedom, not just being locked up in the horrible hell prison they were in.

IMDB has this (at the moment of this blog post) 5.6/10 – I on the other hand gave this a 9/10. I think most people are not going to connect emotionally with the plight of the robots, and to be frank most people seem to be completely detached from emotion now (I think this is a vey big problem for humanity as all they seem to feel is what they are being told to feel).