Science fiction is as much about the present as it is about the future, but The Pod Generation ends up, quite strangely, about neither. Depicting a couple’s decision to give birth using an artificial womb right out of the Apple Store, it makes frequent allusions to the contemporary politics of female autonomy – not to mention, scattered commentary on several current hot-button technological issues – but it ultimately settles on a lukewarm domestic comedy-drama. Its perspective on parenthood feels distracted at best, taking advantage of neither its own sleek, futuristic design, nor its capable leads: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emilia Clarke, who make for a lively pair, but who ultimately struggle to add thematic depth to what little exists on the page.
Written and directed by Sophie Barthes, The Pod Generation doesn’t so much play coy with its location and timeline, as much as it simply forgets to specify them until about an hour in. It may not matter to the bigger picture, but it’s just one of several details that feels half-baked. Rachel (Clarke) is a plain, corner-office professional with little interiority beyond her reactions to her immediate circumstances. She lives with her academic husband, Alvy (Ejiofor), whose enthusiasm for a natural world – one quickly being left behind in this somewhat sterile future – is The Pod Generation's saving grace. Organic plants have been phased out in favor of holograms (which we’re told about, but rarely see) and 3D-printed food is made to resemble full meals, whose taste or texture is never commented upon. This lack of context works against the fact that Alvy’s whole deal is his nostalgic reverence for the tangible. He’s a botanist, at a time when such a profession is no longer profitable, so Rachel brings home the synthetic bacon, thanks to her job at a nebulous tech firm that appears to have something to do with celebrity social media profiles, NFTs, and AI home assistants (it’s not quite clear, but it does involve buzzwords you might recognize).
Initially, the movie’s central conflict surrounds Rachel’s decision – unbeknownst to Alvy – to take the advice of her bosses and sign up for a remote pregnancy, in which her fetus would be housed within an egg-shaped pod at a high-tech institute called The Womb Center. It has all the makings of something strange, charged, and highly relevant, between a woman placed in a tough position by her corporate overlords, a man reluctant to let technology replace nature, and their combined inability to communicate about how best to bring a baby into this world.
However, most of these threads are wrapped up much sooner (and much more neatly) than you’d expect. For the most part, The Pod Generation meanders through lengthy scenes of Alvy growing more acclimated to the device carrying his future offspring, and of Rachel growing more distracted as she ponders the alternative of a natural birth. Their original perspectives eventually change (though this happens at once, rather than gradually), and their disagreements as a couple are also swiftly resolved, lingering just long enough to give the appearance of a thematic through line with dramatic heft.
Meanwhile, The Pod Generation makes constant allusions to its own ideas and their implications; at one point, a character even refers to the womb as “the political issue of our time.” It feels like this ought to be a loaded story of how technology has become increasingly entwined with every aspect of modern life – but it would need a distinct political outlook to do so. There are moments when both main characters grow irritated with their Siri-like assistants (can they not simply turn them off? The question never arises), and there are also times when scant social satire briefly emerges, via the introduction of some overbearing AI tech. But few of these ideas and concepts are allowed the time to gestate before focus shifts back to the main, malformed tale of parenthood.
The screen is always rife with details about this future, but rarely do those details add up in ways that either impact the story, or reveal intriguing dimensions to Rachel and Alvy’s world. Real money and virtual currency exist side by side – a deposit at The Womb Center costs $8,700, while breathing in fresh air around a plant costs one “eGold” – but neither of these figures are framed comparatively with each other, or with other prices in general, and the lack of a distinct timeline makes it hard to assume how much a dollar might be worth at this point in time. There’s little sense of whether these amounts are considered large or small; are Rachel and Alvy bickering over pocket change, or a major investment? Similarly, a detail as simple as Alvy reading a print magazine could potentially tell us more about him, since we don’t see anyone else reading analog material – but we don’t see anyone else reading at all, digitally or otherwise. Outside of what we’re told about Alvy through dialogue, there’s no visual sense of whether his hobby is either a rarity, or a sign of how strongly he remains tethered to the past.
The movie’s attempts to critique corporate capitalism are just as half-baked, with fleeting comments from various supporting characters about human obsolescence and the way this new world functions. But few are the times when the real impact of these hierarchies are shown. The stakes are mostly assumed, rather than felt, and while Barthes’ camera is largely unobtrusive, it’s also un-stylistic when it comes to creating meaning, tension, comedy, or momentum within the frame. When Rachel and Alvy make decisions that are at odds with the Center’s supposedly vice-grip terms of service, the result is never narratively interesting enough to present them with personal challenges. Not only does the film misuse its dystopian premise and utopian production design, but it fails to capture the way they might clash. It hardly ever engages the viewer on the most basic dramatic level, since nearly all of its conflicts are resolved with the snap of a finger.
Worse yet, its tone is especially awkward. It feels torn between sincerity, and limp, ironic satire to the point that its characters’ words and actions seldom have clear dramatic or thematic purpose. The “why” of their decisions rarely matters, and the “what” just as rarely adds up to something meaningful, despite Clarke and Ejiofor’s best efforts to convince us that Rachel and Alvy have been placed in a tough position. If anything, The Pod Generation makes its future seem pretty easy, fun, and convenient, without much need for second thought.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/the-pod-generation-review