Have you seen The Electric State yet? Yeah, me neither. I’ve never been a big fan of the Russo brothers apart from their work on Arrested Development, so their newest Netflix abomination was never going to be a must watch, but I’ve found myself actively avoiding it after seeing its overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics.
The film has been described as “obvious, garish, and just plain dumb” by The New York Times. Variety called it “preachy”. The acting is bad, and consensus seems to be that the adaptation is a bastardisation of its source material, a beloved and complex book. I’m not really surprised – the Russos haven’t made anything good in a long, long time.
The Electric State Uses AI
But a bad movie is just a bad movie. As a meme I love says, if it sucks, hit da bricks. A film may be a colossal waste of money that makes me wonder why Netflix is wasting this much on making absolute garbage when that money could be put to much better use, but at the very least, you don’t have to watch it. What’s more concerning is that the Russos revealed to The Times that they used AI in the film’s post-production.
The usage itself is very minor, at least as Joe Russo tells it. The technology was used for “voice modulation” in the film, and Joe described it as “something any ten-year-old could do after watching a TikTok video”. He also said that Hollywood is already using AI, they’re just not admitting to it because they’re scared, and that while AI can’t be used for “mission-critical work” due to its hallucinations, “in its generative state, AI is best suited towards creativity”.
Obviously, it’s not like the brothers couldn’t have hired a person to do this work – the movie had a reported budget of $320 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever made. Without knowing the extent of the technology’s use, it’s hard to say how much it would have cost to have a human do it, but I’m more worried about the blase way the brothers describe artificial intelligence.
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When they spoke about it, they didn’t seem to consider the ethical implications of its use, or its environmental cost, or even the consequences of normalising the technology. We’ve already seen AI used in films like Late Night with the Devil, and even the Oscar-nominated The Brutalist.
Despite being critiqued for its use of AI, Adrien Brody still won Best Actor for his role in The Brutalist. I hear his acceptance speech is still going on as I write this.
The Russos, obviously, are best known for heading the MCU, and while they’ve since left the franchise, they’re returning to direct Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. I can’t help but wonder how far off we are from seeing AI in those films. We’ve already seen it likely used in the Fantastic Four’s movie posters, though Disney has denied it, and it was used to make the opening credits for Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
The MCU is, despite flagging box office performances and controversy and complications surrounding Jonathan Majors, the biggest film franchise in the world. It was one of the defining cultural forces of the 2010s, dominating the film industry, making nerd culture mainstream. If the MCU starts normalising generative AI in movies, there’s a good chance that we’re going to see it much more.
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