
Writer-director Sophie Barthes‘ The Pod Generation takes place in a future that, as in a lot of poorly aged science fiction, is probably not as close as it may seem. People in the story’s present day–especially urbane, sophisticated, upper middle class city dwellers–live lives entirely organized, anticipated and even therapized by artificial intelligence. When given the chance, Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) even choose to offload the inconvenience of pregnancy to a developing technology that fertilizes and develops fetuses in an entirely automated external shell that looks like a large egg. It’s actually here, in the depiction of the Apple-type Womb Center, that Barthes gets in her best jabs, viciously satirizing the way progressive and feminist talking points get co-opted for marketing purposes.
Barthes is probably best know for her first feature, 2009’s Cold Souls, which also had a high-concept metaphysical premise leading to science fiction melodrama. In that one, another fictional company allows people to streamline their lives by having their souls removed and kept in storage. In the interim, she directed an adaptation of Madame Bovary. That departure aside, it’s clear that Barthes has a fascination with the very real question of how much of ourselves we forfeit when we give the business of living life over to technology.
For an artist seemingly compelled by the messiness of life, though, Barthes’ writing is as cold and clinical as the offices of the Womb Center. Moreover, there’s just too much of it. Every step in The Pod Generation‘s narrative is driven by dialogue.
Meanwhile, despite the talents of Clarke and Ejiofor and the voluminous dialogue, the screenplay expends the minimum energy on establishing Rachel and Alvy as characters. She’s such a hard-working businesswoman that she ought to be leading a romantic comedy. And his only personality trait is a preference for ever-rarer “natural” things like trees and bushes, which The Pod Generation presents as if he were a vinyl record enthusiast. A scene in which he watches Werner Herzog‘s Encounters at the End of the World longingly is, admittedly, kinda funny.
Alvy’s taste for old-fashioned tactility does make sense in a world that is as hermetic and meticulously designed as the movie’s. It’s an oppressive environment but it’s done no favors by equally anonymous cinematography by Andrij Parekh, who has done much better work in the past on films like Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck‘s Mississippi Grind but who, of late, seems to have been mired in “prestige” television, which might explain the tastefully anodyne look of The Pod Generation.
Future-set stories, in any medium, are really about their own present day, which seems counterintuitive but is actually completely obvious. The Pod Generation, though, might actually be yearning for the past. With its binary gender roles and its participation in the backwards stereotype that empowering women emasculates men, it’s quite a conservative movie. But not even in an interesting way.