Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Pod Generation on Hulu, a Dystopian Satire Starring Emilia Clarke as the Mother of Pod Babies (Not Dragons)

I like to call movies like The Pod Generation (now streaming on Hulu) post-Apple-tech sci-fi – you know, movies whose vision of the future is sleek and minimalist and pleasant to the eye, which is all very nice if you’re not thinking too hard about the world’s increasingly unhealthy tech dependency. Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a late-21st-century couple who decide to have a baby, which is all fine and normal, except that she won’t carry the child, which will instead gestate inside an egg-pod that’s about the size of a basketball. That way, she’s a more productive member of society and doesn’t have back pain or have to pee every 17 minutes, and all that. And that’s obviously better, right? Um, sure, unless it’s not? (It’s probably not.)

THE POD GENERATION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An indeterminate time in the future – although we know it’s close to the 22nd century. Somehow, humanity hasn’t melted in the increasing heat or bombed itself into oblivion. Rachel Novy (Clarke) gets up in the morning and is immediately but very gently psychologically assaulted by an AI voice that monitors her nutrition intake, keeps track of her wardrobe and knows her schedule. It nags her to take a “nature pod session,” which is for city folk; they climb into a little cozy spot surrounded by some plants and with a screen projecting pleasant beach or forest scenes. When she’s done with that, she might work some more at Pegazus, a giant megacorp that’s surely devouring all reality, virtual or otherwise, but hey, at least she has a neat standing treadmill desk where she can get her whatever done, which seems to be something to do with managing the company’s “influencers and tastemakers.” (It appears social media is here to stay! Ugh!) On her way home, she might stop to visit Eliza, her AI therapist, which is a giant eyeball on a screen with a pleasant voice spewing psychobabble. Society in general has a politeness to it that might just imply that everyone’s being filmed at all times for social media content, or probably worse! UTOPIA REIGNS.

Rachel’s the primary breadwinner in her household. Her husband Alvy (Ejiofor) – yes, his name is Alvy Novy – is a botanist who probably yields about 57 bucks a year as an adjunct professor who walks through a greenhouse with his New Double Extra-Millennial Millennial students, who wrinkle their noses at the thought of eating a ripe fig off a tree. Alvy doesn’t fit into this world. He’s an old school guy who just wants to put his hands into some soil and bring some up to his nose and breeeeaaathhhe in the loamy goodness. I mean, his bedside table has a book on it that just says FUNGUS on the cover. So it goes without saying that he’s not keen on the idea of him and Rachel visiting the Womb Center, donating their genetic goo and watching it grow into a baby inside a little plastic egg. Conveniently, the egg comes with a charger stand with a slot to plug in food pods for the embryo, and you can monitor it remotely with an app, which comes in handy when you aren’t allowed to take the egg home. Why aren’t you always allowed to take your egg home? Because corporations begin collecting your data before you’re born now, that’s why.

The highly coveted and extremely expensive slot at the Womb Center is a perk of Rachel’s new promotion at work, where the nosy-ass HR stooge encourages her to fulfill herself as a woman without compromising her productivity. “It’s the first time as women that aren’t victims of our biology,” a friend tells her, so this whole thing is actually liberating and feminist, but in a totally fresh and exciting new capitalist-exploitationist kind of way. Alvy eventually acquiesces to the idea, so they go to the Womb Center and meet the smiley-sinister customer-service rep (Rosalie Craig), who guides them through the process, which includes feigning excitement while watching Alvy’s little wiggler fertilize Rachel’s egg on a big screen. But everything flip-flops when Rachel starts having weird pregnancy dreams and begins doubting their choices, and Alvy takes to strapping the egg into a daddy carrier and going to the playground and putting it in the sandbox to play with the other kids. Where is this plot going? I dunno, but Rachel and Alvy’s cat is pretty skeptical, so maybe you should be too.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Post-Apple-tech AI-themed sci-fi kinda began with Her and grew into stuff like Foe, Swan Song, After Yang and now The Pod Generation.

Performance Worth Watching: Clarke and Ejiofor are as watchable as ever, but Craig, as the Womb Center woman with a steely glare and a disconcerting smile, steals scenes with some industrial-strength passive-aggressiveness. 

Memorable Dialogue: Eliza dishes out a doozy: “Therapy can start in utero! You just need to find the therapy icon on your app.”

Sex and Skin: Very brief lady nudity.

Our Take: Most futuro-dystopia movies aren’t funny, but that’s what sets The Pod Generation apart. The most consistent element of writer/director Sophie Barthes’ screenplay is its understated satire, whether it’s a disturbingly offhanded acknowledgment of the pending singularity, parents worried that their babies will be “bored” in their pod-wombs or Alvy mansplaining the nature of lichen to Rachel. This type of half-winking, half-cautionary comedy, in conjunction with relatable and bemused performances by Clarke and Ejiofor, renders the film functional in spite of its lack of dramatic tension, and a conclusion that suggests Barthes had no idea how to end this story. Many films of similar ilk would err toward histrionics and throw in a chase or significant conflict, but this one just drops the curtain. Life for Rachel and Alvy goes on, I guess, good or bad or otherwise, with implications too vague to be satisfying.

The character work tends to drive the movie. Alvy functions as an analog for the audience, who exists a few decades behind the narrative, and therefore tends to prefer the point-of-view of the luddite treesnuggler who’s skeptical of Tech Tech Everywhere Tech, and wonders how pseudo all this Womb Center science is. The role-switching – of Rachel to the uncertain one who wonders if she should’ve conceived and carried naturally like her husband wanted, and Alvy to full-commitment pod-fatherhood – occurs too quickly to be convincing, but it redeems itself when Alvy becomes the overly emotional one, weeping over the suicidal penguin in Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World. If only every film were wise enough to reference Herzog.

The ideas spinning out of Barthes’ screenplay are myriad and half-realized: The crass manipulation of feminist ideology, the war between what’s “natural” and “artificial,” the role of AI in society, how corporate control and ownership has commodified something as fundamental and rudimentary as procreation, complete with built-in systemic bias (the Womb Center ain’t cheap, you know). The Pod Generation doesn’t cohesively, you know, encapsulate all this fodder for thought, but it’s a better-than-nothing situation; there’s enough going on here to warrant your attention, and the subsequent light-to-mediumweight pondering it inspires.

Our Call: The Pod Generation is far from perfect, but it works slightly more than not. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.