There are relatively few works that deserve to bear the title of “masterpiece,” but is certainly one of them — the quiet, heavy, contemplative atmosphere; a young girl’s colorful-yet-fraught past that gave way to a devastating future; the chilling ruminations on consciousness paired with the darkly evocative drawings. Indeed, Simon Stålenhag’s acclaimed graphic novel is every bit a masterpiece as the Russo brothers’ film adaptation of it is a hodgepodge of creative nadirs.

It may be the case that the Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame brain trust of Anthony and Joe Russo and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were entitled to take Stålenhag’s canon in whichever direction they wanted, but if you’re going to take the square peg of graphic literature and shove it into the round hole of a blockbuster film, it should at least be a good blockbuster. Alas, there’s nary a single spark in The Electric State‘s star-studded but uninspired cast, indecisive tonal identity, or even the grossly stilted action sequences that — in all likelihood — are the reason that the Russos decided to make this film at all. They don’t come sloppier than this.

The Electric State stars known non-movie watcher Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, a teenager living in a cyberpunkified, 1990s-era United States that’s been ravaged by a recent war between humans and robots. Life’s rough for Michelle — her parents and brother died in a car crash, everyone around her is addicted to neurocasters (a VR-like headset made to satisfy even the most minor hedonistic impulse), and she lives with a horrible little foster parent named Ted (Jason Alexander, channeling George Costanza to great effect, if by way of parody).

When a robot claiming to be her deceased brother comes knocking at her door, she sets off on a quest to find his actual body. Chris Pratt is also here as ex-solider/current smuggler Keats, presumably to fill the dad cinema quotient that comes with every Russo production.

If you’re like me and have read Stålenhag’s book, you’ll have no trouble identifying all the criminally diluted plot beats and subject matter that now hardly register as meaningful in The Electric State. And yet, that transgression is ultimately a footnote, because there’s absolutely nothing that registers as meaningful in The Electric State whatsoever.

Indeed, the characters act out bizarrely so as to get to the next scene quicker, and then heelturn just as incoherently to resolve non-existent tension. The dialogue is a d4 dice roll between stunted worldbuilding, painfully uninterested jokes, insulting clichés, and monotonous, unstudied pathos. All the space in between? Brain rotting needle drops and expensive VFX flourishes — the latter of which probably had a budget that could have funded at least five fantastic scripts instead of this gross filmic hemorrhage.

To that last point, this isn’t just an awful film — it’s directly harmful to the health of the medium. It’s bad enough that the Russos bought the rights to the novel and hacked it apart beyond recognition — at that point, why not just make an original film so as to not lock away those rights for a writer who will make good on the source material? But at least, at that point, there remains the possibility for an exciting new vision to come about. It is, after all, a loose adaptation.

But to lock the film rights to this brimmingly thoughtful IP behind their AGBO production company, only to then violently shove it into the content slopification machine after being trusted with a $320 million production budget (which measures out to about 16 May Decembers)? Well, that’s a move that should frankly land the Russos in director’s solitary confinement (which they’d be broken out of by Kevin Feige and his pack of Marvel yes-men anyway, but I digress).

Compare this to something like The Fall Guy, the David Leitch-directed, Drew Pearce-penned action comedy that dropped into cinemas last May, and was also loosely based on a same-name IP that the film hardly resembles. Like The Electric State to Stålenhag’s book, you’d be hard-pressed to spot even a smidge of the 1980s television series within The Fall Guy, but one of these films is utterly fantastic while the other is soulless junk.

That’s because The Fall Guy brings new ideas and emotions to the table to fill whatever missing space was left by the absence of the television show’s identity. It smartly draws a parallel between Hollywood stuntworkers and movie stars, and how they’re both regarded in the film business, despite what kind of talents they both harbor (hint: if you need a real-life action hero, you’re not calling the movie star). It keeps its emotional core sweet and light so as to gel cohesively with its creative, similarly-light comedic spirit, all while its more confrontational scenes are played as cartoonish to maintain that lightness throughout. The dialogue playfully conveys consistent character dynamics, and the gags are treated as proper, polished comedy beats rather than some annoying, obligatory tally. The Fall Guy loves being a movie.

Nothing of the sort could be said about The Electric State. It guts the book of all its original nuances and doesn’t have the first idea about what it has to offer in their place. As a result, it shoves in a swath of seemingly random and twice as generic blockbuster beats for no other reason than to fill an arbitrary runtime. These beats are snarky one minute, filled with insincere sappiness (complete with an orchestral string suite) the next, and are completely joyless/thoughtless throughout. There’s not a single moving part of The Electric State that indicates even an iota of creative passion from anyone involved. The Electric State hates being a movie — at least, this adaptation of The Electric State hates being a movie.

In an alternate universe, all is right in the world of film. Audiences regularly turn up to the movie theater for hearty, mid-budget dramedies, blockbusters consistently value their stories in equal measure that they value their spectacle, streaming services offer a limited, rotating curation of old classics, smart genre work, and hot new cinematic mavericks, and The Electric State‘s film rights were purchased by someone like Charlie Kaufman, Jane Schoenbrun, or David Lowery.

But we don’t live in that universe. We live in the universe where the Anoras and American Fictions of the world are hardly given the time of day by the public, where the MCU keeps getting away with its brand-driven narrative, where the quantity of streaming titles obliterate the notion of quality, and where the Russos were given $320 million to curl out a cynical hunk of trash that happens to share a name with Simon Stålenhag’s masterpiece. This to say, we’d better get that wormhole open soon — this is getting exhausting.

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