The new film from French director Sophie Barthes (Madame Bovary) looks to the future. The Pod Generation is a sci-fi thriller due in cinemas on October 25.
The plot takes place in a futuristic New York, in the middle of the 22nd century, where artificial intelligence is omnipresent and nature is scarce. Rachel and Alvy, a couple played by Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor, want to have a child, and turn to the Womb Center, a company that offers parents a gestation pod where the baby will be trained. The result is a more equal and pain-free birth.
Like Aldous Huxley's cult novel A Better World, The Pod Generation portrays an assisted humanity that no longer bothers to give birth itself. The film's social SF take on The Creator, currently in cinemas, also depicts a world ruled by artificial intelligence. The world depicted in Sophie Bartes' film is an unusual one for cinema, gloomy and terrifying in many respects, but the feature remains a satire with an omnipresent sense of humor.
The Pod Generation asks existential questions that are already being asked in 2023: Can an AI be creative? Is an artificial experience worth a real one? And the result is fascinating. Gestation is not the only theme addressed by the film. In the couple of main characters, Rachel is a 22nd-century businesswoman, hyper-connected and 100% AI-enabled. Alvy, on the other hand, is a more traditionalist botanist who defends nature and wants to live among it, in a city where it is non-existent, except in "nature pods".
The film's themes are well-developed, and it's not afraid to go to the extreme, even if it means becoming genuinely frightening. The Pod Generation is a fascinating film, served up by a formidable cast.
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