Director: Sophie Barthes
Writer: Sophie Barthes
“The Pod Generation was largely inspired by all the strange dreams I had during this pregnancy” Sophie Barthes
AI tech executive Rachel Novy (Emilia Clarke) and botanist Alvy Novy (Chiwetel Umeadi Ejiofor) take a technologically-paved path to parenthood. Set near the turn of the 22nd century, The Pod Generation imagines an AI-infused future where human progress is inextricably linked with technological progress. Pregnancy is regarded as an unnecessary burden on pregnant people’s productivity and physicality. Rachel’s company ‘help’ their employees to fund access to the exorbitantly expensive and thus exclusive Womb Centre where prospective parents can ‘optimise’ their decision to have child by having their fetus reach full-term within a digitally monitored artificial womb called a ‘pod’. Rachel opts to sidestep the ‘trauma’ (biologically and professionally) of being a birthing parent through complete ectogenesis, where conception, embryonic development, and gestation take place outside the human body.
The Pod offers “optimized nutrition in a clean, safe, pure environment, so they can put all their effort into growing.”
Despite the commercial promise of ‘freeing’ Rachel from the literal weight of pregnancy, The Pod Generation questions whether technological innovation can offer liberation or just a different form of oppression. Nature like everything else in this future has been commodified, and in a final act of resistance, Alvy and Rachel choose to hatch have their baby in nature (out in a cabin in the woods) even if they have denied themselves the option of a literal natural birth.
Nature has been usurped by technology and the artificial in almost every aspect of life in the film. Botanist and (reluctant) holographic plant architect Alvy teaches students to replicate plants for display. But he passionately implores them to love and protect the vestiges of the natural world that have managed to survive in this future, where nature is monetised, isolated, or ignored. To be natural is to be dirty and devalued. The sanitised cityscape is sharp-grey-suited Rachel’s world. The more earthy-toned and crumpled professor, Alvy is forced into the crevices and attempts to sneak his carefully cultivated plants and environmental activism into their life together.
This future has rejected the messiness of nature. Its unpredictability, wildness, and indeed wonder. Life has been compartmentalised and expurgated. Everything has been constructed to avoid displeasure or unease – the aesthetics of the metropolitan area are clean and neat, purposely replicating the clean low-key aesthetics of Apple. In attempts to purify life has become bland; it is so inoffensive that it’s boring. Plants are contained and commodified: oxygen bars and nature pods are part of the everyday and show that nature is acknowledged as necessary for survival, but separated from the high-tech, highly controlled lives of people living in this future.
“I don’t know what we lose in the process when we want to solve everything through technology…then you start to think about the implications and the real consequences of this kind of advancement and what it means ethically, philosophically and for us as humans…” Sophie Barthes
Alvy loves his wife and is excited to have a child but he is reluctant to reject nature. The inconvenience and instability of the natural processes of sex, conception and pregnancy are considered retrograde. The film asks, if technology can ‘do it for us’, should we just let it? There are great scenes at the Womb Centre where Rachel and Alvy are expected to cheer at the creation of their zygote presented on a large screen in a commercial lab space.
The climactic moment is entirely clinical as cells and not sex are centred. In a sequence that is as ridiculous as it is beautiful, we see the close up of this biological process that has occurred for all of human history (and eons before) unaided. Nature is beamed onto a screen and presented as futuristic. It is reminiscent of the visualisation of fertilisation and the fusing of two gametes in GATTACA (Niccol, 1997). A film where natural births are termed “faith births” with the resulting children disparaged as “in-valids,” “uteros,” or “God children” and barred from opportunities and status because of their messy, uncontrolled creation. GATTACA depicts a future organised according to genetic predictions rather than the realised outcomes of genetic variation. The Pod Generation acts as an intellectual prequel to GATTACA sowing the seeds of a future of genetic discrimination.
Wealth and privilege give Rachel and Alvy choice, but it is under contract. When they decide to escape to nature with the pod, they contravene their contract and become felons as they steal and eventually crack open (criminal damage) the pod. The baby may be theirs, biologically speaking, but the pod and apps that sustain it remain the property of the Womb Centre. The Womb Centre retains both the legal and beneficial ownership of the pod and its contents (zygote/fetus/baby) until the payment and process is complete. The baby has value to the parent (making) company that collects data on the gestation to improve how the process can be marketised. The prospective parents have apps that allow them to interact with the baby. Like a high stakes Tamagotchi, they have alarms to feed and entertain the fetus with premium playlists and macro/micronutrients. The data generated by this engagement with the pod is more valuable than the child in this vision of the future.
As with future forecasting in Fleur Fortuné’s The Assessment, The Pod Generation pairs an environmentalist botanist with a career-focused tech industry worker. In The Assessment, the false promise of technology is presented through brogrammer Aaryan (Himesh Patel) who loses his grasp on reality and fully immerses himself in the alluring fantasy of an AI-generated family rejecting his real-world wife Mia (Elizabeth Olsen). In The Pod Generation technology is presented by and through the female character: Rachel is uncritical of how technology has become inextricably intertwined with every part of her life. Privileged white women and their choices surrounding childbirth are central to both films, but their alignment with technology and nature/nurturing is quite different (please see my review for more on The Assessment).
The allure of AI is abundant in The Pod Generation. But the film is not as critical of it as I had hoped. AI’s reach into the homes, lives, and minds of the people in this world is extensive. Rachel works for a tech company that is constantly trying to revolutionise AI use and integrate it further into life. She is shown to have friends, colleagues, and of course her husband, but her most vulnerable and intimate relationship is with an AI. The AI therapist is an immense, unblinking eye that is surrounded by artificial holographic plant life. Rachel has a natural connection, an affinity with the technology that she develops, sells and uses to dissect her deepest feelings with. Like the holographic flora that makes up the AI interface, the future, as represented by Rachel, has embraced and normalised the unnatural, the inhuman.
Is Rachel also presented as unnatural because of her reactions to the nurturing of her future baby? In one of my favourite scenes from the film (above) Alvy is seen baby wearing. A modified papoose allows prospective parents to carry their pod and this is encouraged for bonding and no doubt comes with a price tag. He is a proud papoose papa who is also seen cooking while a confused Rachel pours herself a glass of wine, sceptical of his attachment to the unborn child. Even with haptic technology, neither parent can feel the baby – the pod’s interface includes a swipe screen to reveal the inside of the pod (like a smart fridge) and apps allow for a sense of connection and control but the parents and birthing parent are cut off from the biological experience.
The majority of popular representations of pregnancy and childbirth from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) to Immaculate (Michael Mohan, 2024) have been directed by men (see Chambers, 2020). In SF, where there are relatively few women directors able to contribute to this conversation, new approaches focus on the bioethics of reproductive futures. Alternative modes of bioethics can, and perhaps should, only be imagined in practice through fictionalised spaces and ideally ones that enable an intersectional outlook. No model of bioethics, especially in the reproductive arena, can ever be politically neutral. In a charged political space, entertainment media allows for the exploration of alternative reproductive futures, placing the perspectives of marginalised bodies at the heart of the conversation.
The Pod Generation questions the emancipatory potential of ectogeensis. Can we imagine futures where perinatal experiences are not pathologised/medicalised, assisted, controlled, and/or commodified?
Podcast:
Listen below to our podcast episode where we discuss Reprofutue, The Pod Generation and The Assessment featuring the brilliant Dr Anna McFarlane:
More from this director:
The Pod Generation is Sophie Barthes’ third feature film and her second science fiction following her debut Cold Souls (2009) and her adaptation of Madame Bovary (2014). Barthes has written the screenplays for all of her films, co-writing with Felipe Marino on Madame Bovary, and given solo credit for the others. She has also worked with cinematographer Andrij Parekh (her spouse) on all three films.
Madame Bovary (2014)
2012 ‘La Muse’ by Sophie Barthes with Michael Stuhlbarg (Short) as part of Hopper Stories (2012
Happiness (2006, 10 mins)
Zimove vesilya/Snowblink (w/Andrij Parekh, 2004, 18 mins)
Further reading:
NOTE: The central heterosexual pairings in both The Assessment and The Pod Generation show inter-racial relationships, although neither presents this as a barrier or narrative point. The only parents shown in The Assessment are an inter-racial couple but they are both female and this imagined future suggests that their child was lab-gestated and biologically theirs without need for a male donor (via in vitro gametogenesis [IVG]).
Katie Small (2023), ‘“The Pod Generation” Imagines a World Without Wombs: A Mother’s Dream?’ The Sundance Institute https://www.sundance.org/blogs/the-pod-generation-imagines-a-world-without-wombs-a-mothers-dream/
Perri Nemiroff (2023) ‘Emilia Clarke on Why She Desperately Wanted to Make Pod Generation Happen’, Collider https://collider.com/emilia-clarke-interview-pod-generation-rosalie-craig
Ali Moosavi (2023) ‘A Commodified Future: Sophie Barthes on The Pod Generation’, Film International https://filmint.nu/sophie-barthes-the-pod-generation-interview-ali-moosavi/