Warning: This article contains spoilers about The Electric State.

For a movie all about robots, The Electric State ended up being more about human connectivity (aww!).

Netflix’s action-comedy based on Simon Stålenhag’s beloved illustrated novel of the same name stars Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt as two humans in an alternate version of the ’90s where the aftermath of a human vs. robot war left society broken. Against all odds, teen orphan Michelle (Brown) and war veteran Keats (Pratt) teamed up with rebel robot to save the world.

By the end of the movie, Michelle and Keats helped the oppressed A.I. robots gain their independence and rights, took down evil corporation Sentre led by Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), helped humanity connect by going offline again, and saved Michelle’s brother Christopher (Woody Norman) … by killing him? If you’ve got burning questions about what just happened in this bonkers adaptation, let’s break it all down with Pratt and directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Is Keats really in love with his robot bestie Herman?

When Keats thought his right-hand bot Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie) died in the big third act fight, he confessed romantic feelings for his pal. Then Herman appeared alive but just a lot smaller, and revealed he didn’t die — he just had to downgrade to a smaller size body after a seemingly fatal injury. And oh yeah, he heard everything Keats just said. “Maybe he likes him more than a friend, yeah,” Pratt says. “I love it. We’ll see. Maybe if there’s a sequel, we’ll explore that further. I think he loves him maybe more than a friend.”

Pratt reveals that he actually improvised that romantic confession during filming, and the Russos loved it so much it made it into the movie. “That came to me in the moment — I hadn’t been planning it,” he says. “And then they showed it to me in one of our ADR sessions… and I was just crying laughing. God, that’s amazing. Please put that in the movie… I’m really proud of it dangerously balancing on the precipice between drama and comedy.”

“It was so entertaining and so heartwarming,” Joe says of Pratt’s improvised line. “It really dimensionalizes the relationship and adds a lot of context to it. And we just thought it was a brilliant piece of improv and it kept it in the film and it reshapes their relationship.”

Another bit of Pratt improvisation that made it into the movie? Keats’ curse, “God bless America.” Anthony reveals Pratt’s own mother says that when she’s angry, and he wanted to bring that into his character. “He really wanted version of swearing, and he used it brilliantly,” Anthony adds.

How was Disney involved in this movie?

In this alternate universe, A.I. robots created by Walt Disney rebel against humans and ultimately lose a war for their rights against their makers. The directors tell EW they had to get Disney’s approval to use its likeness in the movie, which wasn’t difficult considering their history with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “We have a little pull with them,” Anthony says with a laugh.

Joe adds that the idea to bring Disney into the story came later in the process of making the movie. “One of the great things about making a movie that has an immense amount of visual effects is that you still have a capacity to create many new things in post-production, even after production,” he explains. “So that is an idea that came up in post-production as we were editing the film, and we just liked the idea that we had always conceived these robots as being very user-friendly, being designed to be appealing to humans, non-threatening service robots that were just intended to make people’s lives easier and be very pleasant to them.”

Naturally, that led them to deciding their fictional robots came from Disney. “It just felt really delightful to us,” Joe says. “This idea that Walt Disney, who’s done a version of what these robots are in terms of the really appealing cartoons that he’s created, theme parks that he created, et cetera, could also be the source of something like these robots.”

Why is Mr. Peanut the leader of the robot rebellion?

Mr. Peanut is not a Disney character, but Woody Harrelson’s character, a Planter’s Peanuts promotional bot, is the de facto leader of the Disney robot rebellion. The Russos say they added that particular detail just to lighten the overall tone of the movie.

“The graphic novel leans a little darker, [and] we really wanted the tone of this film to appeal to family audiences,” Joe says. “Because the themes regarding technology are, I think, most impactful to the younger audience that deals with it more than adults do, and has to figure out what the world is going to look like moving forward with that technology. We really wanted to make sure that they saw the movie, and Mr. Peanut is just supremely approachable, seemed very funny to us that the Atticus Finch of the robots or the Abraham Lincoln of the robots would be Mr. Peanut, a promotional bot. It just felt like it would give it a folksy kind of charm.”

The directors also tease that there are “hundreds” of other robots they designed and included in the movie as Easter eggs. Check out the background of the scene where Michelle and Keats first arrive at the mall for “dozens” of those, including “Beats our boombox bot,” Anthony says. “He had a bigger role at one point.”

Why did Chris have to die?

Michelle’s genius younger brother Chris foreshadowed his own fate at the very beginning of the movie, when he told Michelle that Einstein had his brain stolen. Evil tech CEO Ethan Skate ended up kidnapping Chris, faking his death, and using his gifted brain to power the Neurocaster technology for his company Sentre, which allows humans to upload their consciousness into drone robot bodies (and ultimately gave humans the upper hand in the war against robots).

After four years of captivity, Chris got away by slipping his consciousness into a Kid Cosmo robot and finding Michelle. After Sentre re-captured him, Michelle fought her way into Sentre HQ to free him, but he revealed his physical connection to Sentre’s technology is “symbiotic,” and the only way to take down the company is to separate him — which would kill him too. But he was ready to die after years of being hooked up to machines, so he convinced Michelle to pull the plug, killing both him and Sentre in one emotional moment.

“Storytelling seems most fulfilling when it not only gives you something, but it asks something from you as well,” Anthony says. “If you’re going to tell a big, epic story about a society that’s falling apart and children who were victimized in this sort of catastrophe, how do you emerge from that in a way that is both on one side hopeful, but also sort of honest to the cost of that journey? That’s just kind of how it all ended up balancing out for us in the story.”

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Joe adds that Christopher was always going to die in the end (although a quick moment in a junkyard seems to imply that Christopher’s consciousness in the Cosmo bot somehow survived). “The films that we loved the most when we were kids were the movies that challenged us,” he says. “And so if we were going to make a family film, we wanted to do it where there was something challenging in it because the movies that affected me emotionally as a child still resonate with me 30 or 40 years later. We were just trying to accurately reflect that some things require sacrifice in order to reach the proper balance or the healthiest place in your life.”

According to Joe, filming that scene with Brown and Normal was “really powerful.”

“I mean, it was devastating for her — Millie is somebody who really taps into her emotions to help her get to the place that she needs to go to and then has a hard time letting go of him,” Joe says. “And it’s a rough scene to play, to imagine the loss of a sibling and having to actually execute the loss of that sibling.”

“It’s a hard scene for a director to go, ‘Okay, let’s do one more take,'” Anthony adds.

Meanwhile, Mr. Peanut showing mercy to Ethan was also intentional from the beginning to show how some robots are more human than humans. “How does morality play into our roles and how does sensitivity to each other play into our future as a society?” Joe says. “The notion that these robots who have been demonized by humans in the film and humans like Skate, that they make a decision at the end to spare him shows their humanity and his lack of humanity, it’s a simple parable.”

Will there be a sequel?

As of now, the Russos have no plans to make a sequel, but they do plan to continue the franchise in other forms. “We love immersive worlds, so we always try to build worlds that have the capability for future storytelling, because that’s what we like,” Joe says. “There is a game currently that’s being released with the movie, and we’re in discussions around a potential show idea that could work for it, but no sequel conversations as of yet.”

The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix.