The movie
The Pod Generation
A New York couple's wild ride to parenthood using a new tool developed by a tech giant, Pegazus.
Length: 109 min
Country: United Kingdom
Language spoken: English
Language subtitles: Dutch
Cast: Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Vinette Robinson
Director: Sophie Barthes
Release date: 25/01/2024
Description
A New York couple have their baby in a plastic pod in Sophie Barthes's tweak of an overly controlling society.
“The Pod Generation” is one of those sci-fi films set in a future that looks just teasingly enough like our own world to heighten the differences. Somewhere near the end of the 21st century, Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wake up each morning in a sprawling high-rise apartment where the window shades glide up with the light, a laser makes your toast, and Siri doesn’t just help you — she wants to have a conversation. Folio, the company where Rachel works, creates and markets AI assistants.
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.
“The Pod Generation” is one of those sci-fi films set in a future that looks just teasingly enough like our own world to heighten the differences. Somewhere near the end of the 21st century, Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wake up each morning in a sprawling high-rise apartment where the window shades glide up with the light, a laser makes your toast, and Siri doesn’t just help you — she wants to have a conversation. Folio, the company where Rachel works, creates and markets AI assistants.
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.
