Remember the 1990s? The Dallas Stars hockey club moved from Minnesota to play in Reunion Arena.
Of course, that was also the decade when a massive robot rebellion rent society asunder.
OK, you might remember the former better than the latter. That’s because the robot revolt luckily only happened in a movie.
This is a sports column about a film.
And more.
I attended a cinema screening of “The Electric State” on Wednesday, prior to the motion picture’s Friday debut on Netflix. As a part of the publicity efforts, the promoters had brought Stars legend Mike Modano to the event. The Hall of Fame centerman took photos and signed autographs at a meet-and-greet, introduced the film, and posted about it all on social media. As a bonus, the fans even got to hang out with Mike’s fellow Hall of Famer and former Stars teammate Ed Belfour, who had just finished a promotional shoot for his Belfour Spirits whiskey company nearby and stopped in to say hi.\
Promoting films through sports tie-ins makes sense for a number of genres. In this case, it also got me thinking about certain thematic parallels.
Spoiler alert: I’ll try not to give away the whole movie, but this column will divulge some plot and character details.
The Electric State takes place in an alternate universe where the Stars never moved to Texas and the Fort Worth Fire built on their 1997 championship to become a CHL dynasty and eventually place an NHL franchise in the Fort Worth Convention Center. OK, no, I’m just kidding. The plot doesn’t actually involve ice hockey at all. Instead, an alternate 1990s society utilized robots extensively to execute labor-saving tasks. The bots became sentient and insisted on exercising rights of self-determination. Human leaders denied their requests and a war followed. The machine team was blowing out the meat team until a defense contractor called Sentre came up with some human cyborg technology that turned the tables. The film’s action takes place after governments relocated surviving robots to a secured desert reservation per the terms of the peace treaty that ended the conflict.
The movie features incredible special effects, but what made it appeal to me was the ethical issues it led me to consider.
It starts with how one views the robots. Humans ostensibly built them, but did the act of creation carry with it a lifetime right of control? Early in the film a human pundit opines something along the lines of robots only having the right to be plugged in and toast his bread, implying they did not have the right to choose an occupation different from that for which they were designed.
We get to see a number of robots clearly designed for certain purposes, including mail delivery, barbering, and baseball. Their leader, Mr. Peanut, probably served a marketing function for Planters. Should they have had the purview to be able to change professions and otherwise live as they wanted once it became apparent they had the ability to intelligently make peaceful and honest choices?
Part of the special effects genius of this film lies in allowing the bots to reflect emotions through mechanical features we might not think would have such capabilities. We see their reasoning capabilities. Bonds develop among bots and between humans and robots. Could the homo sapien governments have avoided a war if they had simply adopted policies based on the 17th-century theory of René Descartes that “I think, therefore I am?”
Indeed, that would have been a change from the way the bots had been previously viewed, but change is inevitable. Regrettably, when human populations have unexpectedly encountered intelligent populations different from them, bloodshed has often resulted. Sometimes the winners forced the losers to live on reservations.
Mistreatment of other groups has often been justified by positioning the strangers as less than human. There’s an implication that because of alleged traits inherent in having a certain skin color, identifying as a certain gender, or resembling an anthropomorphic legume, a population should not get to live freely.
One Electric State character is forced to confront previously held views about the supposed superiority of his own race. Colonel Bradbury had destroyed many robotic enemies during the war and was pressed into service to find some of the film’s protagonists, with violence a likely consequence. During the film, his interactions with robots and other humans lead him to question his positions regarding the subjugation of intelligent robots. I wondered if it were a coincidence that Casting Director Sarah Finn identified Giancarlo Esposito, son of an African American mother and Italian father, for the Bradbury role. Both of those ethnic groups have faced discrimination in the U.S., where the movie is set.
It was the conduct of Sentre leader Ethan Skate (hey, there’s a hockey tie-in) that caused Bradbury to question his allegiance. In addition to creating the battle borgs that allowed mankind to win its war, Skate (played by Stanley Tucci) came up with a way for people to use the same tech to separate work and play and spend time in a sort of fantasy world of their own imagining. Whether big tech making neurocasters would be better or worse for you than social media might be a debate one could have. But a key ethical dilemma stems from how the scientist effectuated his creations. He basically kept a boy genius (the brother of Millie Bobby Brown’s character) in a comatose state and tapped into the boy’s brain to supply the necessary thought power to defeat the robots and give humans their neurocaster fixes.
The boy, Christopher (played by Woody Norman), had been in a car crash when they discovered him. In his unconscious state, he didn’t consent to becoming a kind of human robot. So the question arises as to whether human authorities had the right to authorize Skate to take control of Christopher’s faculties if it was the only way to save the world.
In this case, the decision was made that the end (mankind’s survival) justified the means (violating a person’s right to self-determination). What if they had decided on principle that only Christopher or his legal guardians could make that decision? What if they had then concluded that if Christopher had the right to choose his path, so did all other intelligent beings?
In the film, Colonel Bradbury refrains from killing a human because it’s not in his mandate, only to see a cyborg controlled by Skate do so anyway. When the former soldier later realizes what Sentre has done to Christopher, he decides Skate is less human than a robot. He questions his own deeply-held assumptions and removes his neurocaster helmet. The legendary warrior declines to participate in the final battle, even as robots are going all rock-em-sock-em on cyborg opponents.
The audience gets the impression Bradbury truly believed he was doing the right thing in putting down robots. We’re less sure with Skate, but there are definitely grey areas in his motivations. Did he truly think killing a fellow scientist when Bradbury would not and enslaving a boy made the planet better off? We actually see the end-justifies-the-means argument used a lot in government. The film compels us to ask ourselves whether violating an individual’s rights or demonizing a population that’s different from you is ever actually the right thing to do.
Sports tend to have defined rules. They’ve also historically played a role in demonstrating how individuals of different backgrounds can come together. Established ethical boundaries and a culture of tolerance can be handy tools to deploy in the face of change.
Back in 1993, a lot of Texans had no idea they’d like ice hockey. Mike Modano has a statue in front of the American Airlines Center because he and his teammates proved a sport native to a different part of the continent could prove enjoyable for those of us in the southern U.S. We kept an open mind about it to our betterment. “The Electric State” suggests we consider how we might apply such attitudes to the wider world.
Disclosures: I have pitched projects to Netflix and probably will again. I’ve done work for the Dallas Stars and have documentaries running on their streaming service, Victory+.
