The central premise of writer-director Sophie Barthes' The Pod Generation is something that might only be a background detail in a different sci-fi movie: At an undetermined time in the future, people have the option of gestating babies in artificial wombs, known as "pods," rather than being pregnant and giving birth the natural way. There's potential in exploring how that option might affect society, particularly gender dynamics and the balance of power in relationships, but Barthes makes remarkably little out of it, despite centering almost the entire 110-minute movie around that single idea.
Once The Pod Generation establishes the existence of the Womb Center and the interest of career-minded main character Rachel (Emilia Clarke) in utilizing the company's services, the story doesn't progress much further or offer any surprises. Rachel works a vaguely defined job at a vaguely defined corporate monolith with a creepily ingratiating CEO (Jean-Marc Barr) who resembles Amazon's Jeff Bezos. She's offered a promotion with the veiled threat of its being revoked if she takes time off to have a child, so she turns to the Womb Center, with costs subsidized by her job.
As the main wage-earner in her household, Rachel seems eager to outsource her pregnancy and make starting a family more efficient, but her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a bit of a technophobe, whose job as a botany professor involves introducing students to the now-rare experience of actual plants and fruits. The Pod Generation sets up a simplistic dichotomy to these two approaches in a world where "nature pods" and holograms have taken the place of actual nature, and Alvy's students are afraid to eat a fruit that grew on a real tree.
Alvy is initially resistant to using the Womb Center, but The Pod Generation isn't about a schism in the couple's marriage caused by their divergent views on natural pregnancy. Rachel and Alvy have minor disagreements but ultimately communicate well and clearly love each other, and while it's refreshing to see such a healthy relationship in a dystopian sci-fi movie, it robs The Pod Generation of a central source of conflict. Even potentially antagonistic outside forces, such as Rachel's job and the Womb Center itself, offer only minor obstacles toward Rachel and Alvy's eventual fulfillment as parents.
Rosalie Craig is amusingly condescending as the head of the Womb Center, although her snide attitude doesn't quite make sense in the context of the story. She seems to regard all of the Center's clients with contempt, which allows for some amusing putdowns but also makes The Pod Generation's world-building seem shaky. There are references to apparent corporate privatization, including the end of government funding for education, but Barthes keeps those details vague, much like the purpose of the company that Rachel works for. The Pod Generation isn't a movie about characters rebelling against a totalitarian society, and natural pregnancies are clearly neither outlawed nor uncommon.
That makes the central metaphor of The Pod Generation a little muddled, and the movie's echoing of Alvy's negative attitude toward the Womb Center could be read as critical of real-world alternate means of becoming a parent, including surrogacy, IVF, and adoption. Barthes doesn't seem to have a clear sense of what message she's sending, and a brief late-film scene of protesters outside the Womb Center only adds to the confusion. Alvy and Rachel even express uncertainty over whether pod pregnancies are supported or denounced by feminists.
The Pod Generation succeeds better as a character-driven drama than idea-driven sci-fi. Clarke and Ejiofor have relaxed chemistry as a comfortable longtime couple dealing with upheaval in their lives. Barthes' previous sci-fi film, 2009's Cold Souls, was more comedic and absurdist, but The Pod Generation is rarely funny and plays even its most outlandish ideas relatively straight. With human psychologists apparently obsolete, Rachel sees an AI therapist who's represented as a creepy giant eyeball surrounded by graphics of flowers and plants, but the movie treats this as straightforward and normal. Any humor is so dry as to be indiscernible.
As The Pod Generation goes on, Barthes returns to the same themes, including Rachel's dreams of being physically pregnant and Alvy's futile attempts to get people to appreciate nature -- at one point instructing his students in literal tree-hugging. Instead of building to a climactic confrontation, The Pod Generation peters out into dull sweetness.
Barthes offers a strikingly designed future world with contrasts between antiseptic corporate spaces and earthy nature preserves, but The Pod Generation's storytelling is never as compelling as its design sense. Movies like Gattaca, Code 46, and the recent After Yang have taken on similar themes in more smart, emotionally engaging ways. The Pod Generation is as bland as the inert, beige-colored eggs its main characters rely on to gestate their child.
The Pod Generation opens Friday, August 11, in select theaters.