It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflix’s latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon Stålenhag’s much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the film’s leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.

While you can kind of see where some of the money went, it’s exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated “movies” littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.

Set in an alternate history where Walt Disney’s invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), a rebellious teen orphan desperate to escape her abusive home. Like most kids around her age, Michelle’s world was turned upside down during the brutal human / robot conflict that began with thinking machines demanding equal rights as sentient beings. But whereas most of her peers lost loved ones specifically because of the war, an ordinary car crash is what tears Michelle’s family apart and leads to her being adopted by loutish layabout Ted (Jason Alexander).

With her parents and brilliant younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) seemingly dead, Michelle doesn’t feel like there’s all that much to live for. Much like her chaotic adoptive home life, school feels like a prison to Michelle because of the way children are expected to learn everything using Neurocasters, bulky headsets that transport wearers into virtual realities. Though many people like Ted gleefully strap their Neurocasters on, the technology disgusts Michelle, in part because of how they were first created as tools to give humans an edge in the machine war.

Given how people still live in fear of being attacked by the few surviving robots sequestered in the Exclusion Zone, Michelle can’t fathom why other people are so game to tune the real world out. Michelle herself is constantly looking over her shoulder in case a bloodthirsty machine finds its way into her room. But when one of them actually does, she’s charmed by the fact that it looks like one of her favorite cartoon characters. And she’s shocked when it tells her (through canned catchphrases from the cartoon) that Christopher is actually alive.

Though Michelle’s new robot friend looks very much like one of Stålenhag’s illustrations, its vocal impairment makes it read as a cutesy spin on the live-action Transformers’ take on Bumblebee. As it urges Michelle to follow it on a mission to find Christopher, you can almost hear the Russos and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely patting themselves on the back for creating a character who encapsulates everything about The Electric State’s war-torn world. It’s a damaged thing that just wants to be seen as a person and given the chance to live its life in peace. Those details could have made for an interesting narrative if there were any more depth to them or if Brown could muster up even an ounce of chemistry with her CGI companion. But The Electric State is much more concerned with simply showing you as many of its broken machines as it possibly can.

Outside of a multitude of cultural references meant to remind you that it’s set in the ’90s, and shots of Neurocaster users lying passed out on the street like junkies, The Electric State never feels very interested in doing the kind of worldbuilding necessary to make movies like it work. Instead, it simply spells out that the inventor of the Neurocaster, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), is a villain who wants Colonel Marshall Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to capture Michelle’s robot. And Bradbury’s chasing after the pair gives the film a way to show how littered The Electric State’s world is with the rusted frames of machines destroyed during the war.

The movie becomes that much more of a slog once Michelle crosses paths with boring smuggler Keats (a profoundly charmless Chris Pratt) and his wisecracking robo-friend Herman (Anthony Mackie), who make a living selling things they scavenge from the Exclusion Zone. Unlike Brown’s Michelle, Pratt and Mackie actually do manage to come across as people who have lived through a sort of apocalypse and become much weirder due to their general isolation from the outside world. Their knowledge of the Exclusion Zone and access to vehicles makes them perfect to get Michelle and her robot to their destination. But the sheer number of jokes about Twinkies and Big Mouth Billy Bass (again, this is the ’90s) that The Electric State has Keats spit out is enough to make you root for Bradbury.

Part of the problem is that The Electric State is never all that funny, though the movie certainly thinks it is as it starts to introduce some of its more unusual robot characters like mail-bot Penny Pal (Jenny Slate), spider-like fortune telling machine Perplexo (Hank Azaria), and their leader, Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson). You can almost imagine The Electric State working if it were more focused on the lives of the pariah machines — all of whom are somewhat evocative of Sid’s horrific creations in Toy Story.

But rather than tapping into those characters’ potential, the movie spends its last third rushing headlong into tiresome action sequences that fall far short of what you would expect from such an expensive project. Ultimately, The Electric State leaves you with the distinct sense that Netflix greenlit it assuming that the Russo bros. + IP + a bunch of well-known actors would = a movie people would reflexively want to watch. But that math simply doesn’t add up, and this feels like an instance where you’d be much better off just reading the book.

The Electric State also stars Colman Domingo, Ke Huy Quan, Martin Klebba, Alan Tudyk, Susan Leslie, and Rob Gronkowski. The movie is now streaming on Netflix.