Perhaps someone could have made a compelling adaptation of “The Electric State,” Simon Stålenhag’s well-regarded 2018 graphic novel.

Regardless, the Russo brothers haven’t.

Siblings Joe and Anthony — who directed box-office hits for Disney-owned Marvel Studios that include the two-part epic consisting of 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” and 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” — whiff on an ambitious swing with “The Electric State,” which debuts this week on Netflix.

They have shot for an adventure akin to the beloved Amblin Entertainment movies from the 1980s — “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Gremlins,” “Back to the Future,” etc. — which, as they note in the film’s production notes, respected children by offering them stories with real stakes. However, it’s hard to imagine kids — or, for that matter, adults — will be consumed by this dystopian, if colorful, science-fiction adventure.

And, hey, the Russo brothers are far from the lone reason to have high hopes for “The Electric State.” It stars a couple of relatively heavy hitters in Millie Bobby Brown, a star of Netflix hit series “Stranger Things,” and Chris Pratt, a veteran of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the aforementioned “Avengers” entries. Plus, Stanley Tucci, Ke Huy Quan and Giancarlo Esposito are key supporting players, with myriad other well-known talents — Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Colman Domingo and Alan Tudyk among them — providing voice work for characters also co-portrayed by motion-capture actors.

Shoulda been better.

“The Electric State” is set in an alternate version of the 1990s, years after The Walt Disney Co. created robots for its theme parks, with other corporations soon using them for work unappealing to humans. Of course, as artificial beings have a habit of doing in such stories, they decided they wanted more from life, banded together and — led by (wait for it) a Mr. Peanut robot (Harrelson) — went to war with humanity. The outlook was bleak for fleshy types until tech mogul Ethan Skate (Tucci) developed the neurocaster, a large headset that allowed a person to control a bipedal mechanized device that turned the tide and led to a treaty.

Now, Skate’s thriving company, Sentre, sells a consumer version of the neurocaster, allowing its user to escape into a virtual reality.

Brown portrays Michelle, who, following the death of her family in a car accident, lives with a rotten, neurocaster-addicted foster father (Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” fame). She’s lost emotionally and having difficulties at school, where she refuses to wear one of the headsets, as required, in class.

Michelle is visited at night by a friendly-looking robot based on a character from the “Kid Cosmos” cartoon, which she and her brilliant younger brother, Christopher (Woody Norman) — like, a goes-to-college-as-a-kid genius type — used to watch. The robot, Cosmo (Tudyk), can only gesture and play audio of phrases from the show, but she quickly comes to believe it’s being controlled by her brother and sets off with it to find him.

Along the way, this unusual duo meets another, a soldier-turned-smuggler, Keats (Pratt), and his sarcastic robot partner, Herman (fellow MCU vet Mackie, with a significantly modified voice).

They’re being hunted by Esposito’s robot-detesting Colonel Marshall Bradbury, via a mech, on behalf of Skate, who’s heavily invested in stopping Michelle from attaining her goal.

Eventually, Michelle and company encounter a commune of robots, which, yes, is headed by Mr. Peanut. It’s also home to the rather charming Penny Pal (Slate) and unbelievably unfunny grizzled baseball player bot Pop Fly (Cox). There, Michelle also gets vital information from Dr. Amherst (Quan), the physician who’d told her that her brother had died in the crash.

It’s said you need to crawl before you can learn to walk. Sadly, “The Electric State” — penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, a screenwriting duo that worked on several MCU flicks, including the Russos’ “Avengers” installments and their “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) and “Captain America: Civil War” (2016) — never matures beyond the crawling phase. This is a movie that feels much longer than its two-hour-ish runtime.

Sure, Pratt (the “Jurassic World” movies) is always good for at least a laugh or two, but we get almost nothing from anyone else, including a, well, robotic Brown, who’s turned in much better work in two much more entertaining cinematic affairs from Netflix: “Enola Holmes” (2020) and “Enola Holmes 2” (2022).

If “The Electric State” truly were for children, some of the choices made in its making would be more defensible, but it earned a PG-13 rating thanks to content that’s more suitable for teens and adults.

Value exists in its (increasingly common) message about the value of human connection in an increasingly digital world, a message hammered home in its final minutes. However, it’s hard to imagine all that many viewers of any age making it that far.

The Russo’s are getting back into the MCU in a big way, as the directors of “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” set for 2026 and 2027, respectively.

Here’s hoping they got making a real dud out of their collective system.

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‘THE ELECTRIC STATE’

1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sci-fi violence/action, language and some thematic material)

Running time: 2:10

How to watch: On Netflix March 14

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