A quick programming note: The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood podcast is moving from its longtime home of noon Eastern on Saturday to Friday morning so I can include it in this email, which is shifting to Friday afternoons. This week’s episode is particularly interesting—Ross Benes and I discussed his new book, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times and got into how professional wrestling and the Insane Clown Posse help explain Donald Trump—so I hope it doesn’t get lost in your Friday morning shuffle!

Before we get to The Electric State, a brief story.

In the mid-1990s, Will Smith sat down with his closest adviser and tried to answer two different strategic questions. The first question: What was a movie star? Yes, yes: good-looking, charismatic, etc. More to the point: What did a movie star portray on the big screen? They settled on the following: A movie star portrays “courage, ingenuity, [and] success at all odds” in the hopes of making someone a better person. And let’s not forget “the three F’s of movie stardom: You have to fight, you have to be funny, and you have to be good at … sex.”

The second question involved reverse-engineering box office success. What did the highest-grossing films have in common? This analysis was blunter but still useful: Ten out of ten featured special effects, nine out of ten featured special effects and creatures, and eight out of ten featured special effects, creatures, and a love story. (As Smith noted in an aside, “We would eventually discover that all of the top ten movies were about love, but we did not notice that then.”)

Combining the answers arrived at in those two questions—what kind of movie stars put butts in seats and what kind of movies put butts in seats—helps put into context Smith’s nearly unmatched run of success: his stretch from Bad Boys in 1995 through Hancock in 2008 is one of the great box-office success stories of all time, and the biggest hits from this period (Men In Black, Independence Day, Men in Black II, I Am Legend, and Hancock) all hew pretty closely to Smith’s formula for success.

One might even describe Will Smith as an early adopter of algorithmic filmmaking.

There was a period where people thought Netflix’s praise for “algorithms” meant, I dunno, a computer spitting out ideas for movies. In reality, it was more like “audiences turn off a movie if you haven’t had an action beat three minutes in” and “audiences will click on a movie if the tile advertising that movie on Netflix’s home screen features something they liked from a previous film they watched.” The data was useful, but not determinative.

The Electric State really does feel like pure algorithmic effluvia, however, a sort of soulless, AI-powered effort to identify what makes movies work. “How do we start a big new franchise?” one might ask the almighty algo. And it might respond with something like the following: “A new franchise should be based on a comic book. It should be directed and written by high-grossing, and thus successful, filmmakers. It should star people who have succeeded in other franchises and have supporting actors who are familiar to your audience.”

Each individual element of the above appears in a slightly curdled form in The Electric State.

Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel, which follows a teenage girl’s journey to save her brother, is a haunting portrait of an America in the midst of collapse from VR addiction, the blasted mechanical skeletons of some horrible conflict littering the landscape. The film is directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the third- and fourth-highest-grossing directors of all time, and written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the second-and-third-highest-grossing screenwriters of all time.

And The Electric State stars Chris Pratt, who has excelled in the MCU and the Jurassic World franchises, and Millie Bobby Brown, who has demonstrated the ability to attract eyeballs in Stranger Things (Netflix’s second-most-watched English-language show) and Damsel (which debuted last year as Netflix’s worldwide top movie). Supporting actors include Jason Alexander (Seinfeld), Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad), and Stanley Tucci (The Devil Wears Prada), key parts of previous streaming hits for the network.

On paper, this all tracks as a formula for success. In reality, it’s all slightly off, like a funhouse mirror’s solution to every statement above. Yes, The Electric State is based on a graphic novel, but it is not a “comic book” in the franchisable, super-powered sense. Yes, the Russos and Markus/McFeely have huge box-office totals, but their numbers are impossibly skewed by the otherworldly success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Chris Pratt is Chris Pratt (and he’s the best part of this movie; his comic relationship with robot pal Herman, voiced by Anthony Mackie, is the movie’s only real spark of life) but his ability to launch (as opposed to sustain) a franchise is unproven. Millie Bobby Brown is horribly miscast (I’ll get into why in a second) and it’s not clear to me that fans of, e.g., George Costanza are going to stick with this movie long enough to even get to Jason Alexander’s (very brief) appearance.

Most importantly: it’s just not very good.

The Electric State posits an America in which Walt Disney invented friendly robots that replaced most human labor and then revolted, demanding freedom and the right to self-determination. The war between the humans and the bots was vicious, ending only after Ethan Skate’s (Stanley Tucci) creation of human-piloted battle droids and a technology that allowed people to exist online and in real life simultaneously. The defeated robots were sent to a prison colony taking up most of the American Southwest known as the Exclusion Zone. This is the world Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) and Christopher (Woody Norman) an older-sister, younger-brother duo live in. He’s a prodigy heading off to college until a car accident kills their parents and, supposedly, Christopher.

Spoiler: He’s not dead. Somehow, Christopher’s mind has inhabited the body of a robot (which, again, are illegal outside of the Exclusion Zone) and he has made his way to her in an effort to reunite mind and body. Michelle will need the help of Keats (Chris Pratt), a Han Solo-style trucker dealing in rare artifacts smuggled out of the Exclusion Zone, to pull this off and take down Skate’s evil Sentre corporation before her robot brother is killed by the Butcher of Schenectady (Giancarlo Esposito).

Also, Woody Harrelson plays Mr. Peanut. The mascot.

A problem with The Electric State is that it is spectacularly misconceived in one simple but key way. The filmmakers are aping the style and sensibility of Amblin-era kids adventure movies—think E.T. or The Goonies—but the brother-sister pairing is all wrong. Millie Bobby Brown is too old for the part and her character is too old for this part. Michelle should have been an overly articulate 10- or 11-year-old girl, the sort of age at which it makes sense for her to blindly believe something like “my brother’s mind inhabits the body of this machine and he is being held prisoner by an evil corporation and I have to save him.” Instead of brash, childlike precocity, Brown projects a sort of annoying older-teen obstinacy.

Compare this movie to something like Super 8, which traffics in similar Amblinstalgia, and you realize the problem immediately: it’s a kid’s movie. You can jam in ideas about the intoxicating nature of virtual reality in an increasingly decrepit real world (though Amblin’s own Steven Spielberg did it better in Ready Player One) or the evils of denying sentient robots the right of self-determination (again: Spielberg himself did this better in A.I.), but the story has to both be about children and resonant to children. Instead, Brown is playing almost a motherly role here, a sort of surrogate parent who by film’s end is faced with a horrible choice. It just … doesn’t work.

One might be able to overlook all this if The Electric State were exciting, if it worked as an action movie. Unfortunately, it isn’t and it doesn’t; there isn’t a visceral sequence in the whole picture, which is surprising given that the Russos made Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Even their previous Netflix film, The Gray Man, which I think absorbed an unfair amount of critical opprobrium when it was released, was doing some interesting work with drones and gunplay in tight city streets. Combined with the fact that the sets and locations all felt kind of sparse and empty, and The Electric State just feels a little cheap.

Which is probably not what you want from a movie with a reported $300 million-plus budget, particularly given the lower-than-hoped audience numbers.

Turns out there are limits to the usefulness of algorithmic moviemaking.