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 (26 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 [6 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 [4 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 [3 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 [1 favorite]

Oh, this Russo thing really seems like the wrong energy.
posted by senor biggles at 3:19 PM on October 17 [3 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 [4 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 [2 favorites]

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]

I’m looking forward to this. I have Stålenhag’s graphic novels/art books. I enjoyed Tales from the Loop the series on the most part. The Electric State looks like it might deviate from the book quite a bit to hit that more action/adventure/scifi market. But I’m generally not overly precious about how loyal an adaptation is to its source material as long as it’s enjoyable in its own right. I think the big thing is will they get the aesthetic right.
posted by eekernohan at 8:24 PM on October 17

Oh, this Russo thing really seems like the wrong energy.

It looks like it could be a fun popcorn movie (and I love the continuing renaissance of Ke Huy Quan), but much like Will Smith's I, Robot (also a perfectly decent popcorn movie), trying to tie it to this source material won't do justice to the source material and probably won't do anything beneficial for the movie, either.

There's something about the vibe of Stålenhag's work that just feels very...Swedish...somehow, and I can't help but wish they'd found a Swedish director to give it to. Tomas Alfredson strikes me as somebody who could've captured the appropriate feel.
posted by mstokes650 at 8:29 PM on October 17

I really like the images from the origional Tales from the Loop artbook, they rarely feel *threatening* but more like...nostalgic and weird? Like, something big and bad and scary happened a generation ago, and now kids are playing on the rusting robots and such. Very much my thing.

I was sad that every time he moves forward (into the 90s with Things from the Flood, and again with The Electric State) he gets darker and darker, when I'd love to see my childhood done with the same lens as Tales from the Loop. (Which is interesting as the author is only a little older then me, so I'd expect him to have similar nostalgia points)
posted by Canageek at 9:15 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

I found the Tales From The Loop episodes satisfying, but while I was watching I felt like I was listening to a great cover of a song that's unexpectedly in a different genre. Unlike the slow dreary tone the show embraced, I find the original art uplifting and hopeful, sometimes even cheery. There's a wry wit about it that the show seemed to overlook. This new Netflix movie gives me similar vibes. I'll like it, but again, as a genre compatible with the original art, but not of it.
posted by foxtongue at 9:28 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

TftL, and it looks like this, are oddly like moving-picture still lifes (of digital “paintings”), not exactly matching my own associations but interesting to see how someone else interprets the source material.
posted by Claude Hoeper at 11:04 PM on October 17

Great post. I love Stålenhag's work, but didn't know about this. Agree that Amazon's Tales From the Loop was somewhat disappointing, but maybe that's also kind of appropriate? I certainly understand why people want to make adaptations of his stuff, but also feel like it's always going to miss the mark a little bit (or a lot). By turns beautiful and horrific, he's just such a vibe, and I don't know if American production companies can get there. Agree with mstokes650 that it would have been best to give the project to a Swedish director, but that's just not how Hollywood works.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:22 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]

The trailer so upset my partner that I went and ordered them The Labyrinth immediately, which they had held off on buying during the original run due to some reported print quality issues, which seem to have since been addressed.

It’s cool to see his creations in motion but I might have to watch them with the sound off playing some of Stalenhag’s music in the background to even try to appreciate it. Millie Bobbie Brown was an inspired choice but having her team up with the cop for a buddy road trip and having him be played by Chris Pratt was… not. And I’m not even the huge Stålenhag fan in the household.
posted by brook horse at 6:55 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]

I want to invite Mr. Stalenhag to visit the ecologically delicate summit of Hawaiiʻs Mauna Kea, to portray what the projected Yankee Stadium-sized Thirty Meter [!!!] Telescope would look like perched atop this nearly pristine and sacred space, alongside the orders-of-magnitude smaller obsoleted astro-structures currently decomposing there in polluting desuetude, their complex mirror-calming molecules oozing their way down into the island aquifer.

According to the astronomers, the Thirty Meter Telescope will have a useful life of about 25 years.

Decades ago, the astronomers promised that if they were permitted to build structures on Mauna Kea, once their telescopes were no longer needed, they would thoroughly remove all structural and chemical traces of them. These promises were never kept.

I feel certain that Mr. Stalenhag would find this crassly exploited unique environment worthy of his talent and interest.
posted by Droll Lord at 1:04 PM on October 18 [3 favorites]

Here's my quick take on the trailer: The high piano notes instantly put me into Blade Runner 2049, so a dystopian future in the fog, a lone woman riding around in some hellish reality. Add some production notes from the Netflix series 'The Peripheral, ' which shows people tripping out with their VR helmets in a hellish dystopic future.
Robots with giant heads—why? Robots that smile and say amusing things are very kid-friendly. Volkswagen Transporter...got to get those boomers. There are many fight scenes with explosions and exciting things on the screen..... It better add more AI-generated CGI (note from the executive team). Chris Pratt (star power + high audience agreeability factor + MCU associations), fantastic overblown music, lots of 'feels'... the movie blockbuster algorithm says we're green to go. Tweak it a bit for maximum Spielbergian cutesiness. Add a couple of hundred million dollars, and let 'it rip.
So, sarcasm aside, this movie trailer says, 'product generated by a business team + finely calculated marketing aimed at a particular audience. It seems so manufactured that if you're info gritty real sci-fi....I'm not likely to see it based on what I just viewed. It's like a giant copy-and-paste job.
posted by diode at 6:24 AM on October 19