Drone Sweet Drone

October 17, 2024 1:30 PM

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish visual artist renowned for his beautiful, unsettling works combining pastoral landscapes and neglected, nostalgic locales with the striking presence of massive retro-futuristic technology. While most of his works come in the form of concept art, vignette series like Tales From the Loop (adapted into an underrated Amazon Prime anthology), and the occasional music video [previously], his most narratively compelling title is surely The Electric State -- a melancholy, apocalyptic vision of an alternate-history 1990s California Pacifica littered with spaceship hulks and rotting androids, in which a young girl searching for her brother journeys with her mute robot across a rapidly disintegrating society consumed from within by an addictive neural-VR craze that's birthing a race of ominous Lovecraftian machines. The tale inspired video essays, animations, and even roleplaying games, and fans took note when Netflix optioned the book for a big-budget adaptation. But though the project nails the imagery and has a stacked cast, the first look and teaser trailer suggests the Russo-directed blockbuster may be more in the vein of "Fallout + Marvel with an endearing team of ragtag robots" than "unspeakable horrors slithering through your headset."
posted by Rhaomi (17 comments total)

Looks like good fun! Something to hang on until March for, I guess.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:44 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Man, I really really wanted to love Tales From The Loop.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:45 PM on October 17 [4 favorites]

I on the other hand, really really love Tales From The Loop. I hardly ever re-watch because I also have to be in just the right mindspace for it, so had I seen it at a different time I might not have loved it nearly so much.
posted by tclark at 2:01 PM on October 17 [3 favorites]

I also loved Tales from the Loop; not so much Dark Mirror as Melancholy Mirror. It's an unusual flavor.
posted by chromecow at 2:03 PM on October 17 [2 favorites]

Loved Tales From the Loop, too. Was sad it wasn’t renewed.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:06 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

I felt like every time a Tales From The Loop episode was only about kids, it worked well, but as soon as you got adult characters who worked as scientists and technicians at the lab, they all went around uttering fuzzy metaphoric expressions of philosophy instead of just talking like geeks with jobs. It happened in the first episode: a little girl asks her mother what the Loop is, but she never really gets an answer.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:37 PM on October 17

Oh, this Russo thing really seems like the wrong energy.
posted by senor biggles at 3:19 PM on October 17 [2 favorites]

For me, Tales from the Loop was interesting and it looked good but it was pretty damn depressing. So much so that I didn’t finish the series.

That said, I love Stalenhag’s vision and devoured the books, looking for clues about how I should be interpreting the stories. I‘ll be very curious to see how a blockbuster movie interprets it all!

Rhaomi, as always, this is a lovely post. Thank you for all you do.
posted by ashbury at 3:59 PM on October 17 [3 favorites]

The first look photos struck me as way off from the vibes of the book.

The teaser trailer captured a little of the darker shadows, but I can't expect a Netflix production helmed by the Russos to really draw on the deeply unsettling and melancholy apocalyptic singularity setting of the narrative.

I do like sci-fi with robots, so there's that to look forward to, but I suspect the film adaptation and the book are going to occupy distinct spaces in my head (and one of those spaces might be forgotten relatively quickly).

I was a bit disappointed that the shot in the teaser didn't pan down low enough to show whether Ted was suffering from neurocaster-induced male lactation.
posted by audi alteram partem at 4:00 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

I've never seen anything quite like these images. Some have 4-5 focal points and the rest is partial perception with many concepts with-in the images that tell a story (ies). Shades of a wide variety of artists are there but that's like saying we also breath argon. This one, has an "all your base" feel. wonderful.
posted by clavdivs at 4:13 PM on October 17 [2 favorites]

audi alteram partam: The teaser trailer captured a little of the darker shadows, but I can't expect a Netflix production helmed by the Russos to really draw on the deeply unsettling and melancholy apocalyptic singularity setting of the narrative.

If you want dark, imagine their adaptation of Stalenhaag’s Labyrinth.
posted by dr_dank at 5:27 PM on October 17

Wow, definitely also check out his paleoart!
posted by deadbilly at 5:32 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Didn't the graphic novel have an LGBT subplot? Did they drop that for the movie? (Chances are: yes. But who knows.)
posted by Vegiemon at 5:36 PM on October 17

And moments of horror
posted by ashbury at 6:03 PM on October 17

Whoa, thanks for this post. Stålenhag's work is right up my alley but I hadn't heard of it before.
posted by mollweide at 6:09 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Chris Pratt AND Millie Bobbily Brown?!
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 6:43 PM on October 17

Stålenhag's IG account is magnificent. It's like the visual equivalent of Boards of Canada teasing you with new song demos on a regular basis. Microbursts of discomfiting brilliance regularly arresting your scrolling.

(I also loved Tales from the Loop, even as I recognized it wasn't 100% nailing it for me ... but it was probably 95%.)
posted by mykescipark at 7:03 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]