The Pod Generation, which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival, has an intriguing idea for a science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, the idea never coalesces into a compelling story.

ADVERTISEMENT
In the future, technology has enabled the Pegazus Womb Center to gestate babies in its pods, freeing up women to continue working for nine months. Rachel (Emilia Clarke) is a tech savvy career woman but her husband, Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) prefers nature and has reservations about the Womb Center.

The premise of The Pod Generation should be the beginning of an engaging story. The movie, however, is all concept. It never feels like a world in which people live or relationships people have.

The best science fiction suggests a world larger than the main characters. Blade Runner, Robocop, The Terminator, The Matrix and more all convey rich worlds beyond the central story.

The Pod Generation is just a collection of ideas and the Womb Center just a vehicle for stating themes that should be implicit.

Great science fiction also asks social and philosophical questions. One hopes it does so subtly.

The Pod Generation literally has Rachel and Alvy visit supporting characters who only exist to question the protagonists, or philosophize about this futuristic society. One of Rachel's friends monologues about the double standard on pregnant women and how the Womb Center empowers women.

A stronger screenplay would have depicted Rachel, or at least a pregnant friend, experiencing that bias. Then it could show Rachel avoiding the same issue, but The Pod Generation depicts neither.

FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS!
Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source!
Questions continue to arise throughout the film as The Pod Generation just dumps more and more information. It's no surprise that the Womb Center has more control than their clients do, because this is a dystopia.

To the film's credit, the production design is solid. Sterile offices and living questions would be engrossing if they served any purpose other than facilitating the Womb Center story.

Aside from the Womb Center, the technology in The Pod Generation seems like a plausible extension of what exists on smartphones. Rachel and Alvy's smart home 3D prints their breakfasts.

Elena (voice of Megan Maczko) is like Alexa 2.0 who controls the house, bioscans Rachel and Alvy and responds to voice commands. Elena, however, has demands of her own.

Artificial intelligence also handles therapy in the world of The Pod Generation. The way The Pod Generation depicts the A.I. therapist, it's hard to believe clients would have given up human therapists for this algorithm.

Pegazus's founder (Jean-Marc Barr) is blatantly modeled after Jeff Bezos and speaks to the world's declining birth rate. Considering 2023 society may be on the cusp of overpopulation, a declining birth rate doesn't seem all too threatening.

However, it's not a stretch to think that if the birth rate did decline, a corporation would come up with a solution from which they could profit. Still, the movie shows no indication of such a problem, so The Pod Generation just takes the founder's word for it.

The Pod Generation continues to drop details about the dystopian society an hour into the film. By the halfway point it's clear this movie is resigned to throwing out exposition rather than building a brave new world.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.