), or walking disasters , Clarke has had few opportunities to play whole people in movies, and even fewer than that to unlock her wildly underused anxious dork energy.The Pod Generation
has too much on its mind, introducing one idea after another as worldbuilding details to buttress its main concerns about women’s bodily autonomy. As fumbles go, Barthes straining her story’s seams isn’t a game-ender; when making art that imagines the future by mulling over the present, it’s worse by far not to think enough. It’s not the filmmaker’s fault that a tech doofus has rebranded Twitter as “X” or that the NFT market sank and took every Bored Ape variant with it.
Rachel’s simultaneous positions as higher earner and birthing person means a decision about when and whether to have kids will potentially place her career on hold and her body in repair mode. Fortunately, she lives in tomorrow-land, so there’s a gadget for that. Pegazus, another tech world entity, has developed detachable artificial wombs – pods – that let women off their biological clock and allow men to partake in pregnancy to an extent never before possible. Alvy doesn’t like it.
“Progress has never made anyone redundant,” says Rachel’s coworker, Alice . “It’s here to help.” She’s reassuring a junior employee at their firm of her job’s security in light of the new AI assistant they’re rolling out – another fake eyeball, this time mounted on a desk-friendly stand. The line practically begs the question, a clear setup for the film’s skepticism of Alice’s premise. Butwisely avoids preaching. Barthes isn’t anti-tech, exactly.
Off in the plot’s margins, questions are raised about who gets to make that choice in terms of access, because pod babies don’t come cheap , and how the world outside the Womb Center might react to uterine obsolescence; a shot near the end shows a protest outside the building’s lobby, furious women waving signs about their wombs, a provocative thought that also feels rushed, as if it occurred to Barthes only in the final draft that one feminist body or another would consider the pods a form of...