This satire on our techno-capitalist future is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.
Here’s a new start-up idea: an advanced technology that allows fetuses to listen to podcasts lest they get bored in utero. That’s what the Womb Center offers in Sophie Barthes’s “The Pod Generation,” a wickedly funny and fun, if disconcerting, film that arrives right on time for our age of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence doomerism.
In a sci-fi future where everything is ruthlessly, comically optimized by advanced tech, the Womb Center offers digitally monitored, egg-shaped pods that will carry one’s baby to term. It’s an enticing option that puts Rachel (Emilia Clarke), who works for an A.I. company, and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a botanist frustrated by society’s disconnect from nature, at odds with each other.
As the couple, played with a terrific chemistry by Clarke and Ejiofor, hesitantly opt into the process, the film satirizes our fetishization of a digital utopia, one in which techno-capitalism is the solution to all things, from education and health care to patriarchy and, apparently, all the unsightly, inconveniencing aspects of womanhood (i.e., pregnancy and motherhood). While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.
Much of the fun comes simply in existing within the comedic dissonance between this absurdist reality and the dubiously soothing, richly observed utopia. The most telling and damning revelation can be found in considering the film’s immersive sci-fi world alongside its distant cousin that exists in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her”: the differences in their sensibilities offer a portrait of the downward progression between the tech optimism of the early 2010s, when start-up culture was still considered cool, and the terrifyingly rapid, consuming forces that our digital future has become since.
The Pod Generation
Rated PG-13 for suggestive material, partial nudity and brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
