PARK CITY, UTAH — The mother of dragons becomes the mother of an artificial fetus in ‘The Pod Generation,’ a shaky new sci-fi comedy that premiered Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival.
Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke stars in the satire of our ever-closer relationship with technology as Rachel, a futuristic workaholic who decides to have a baby with a “pod,” an egg-shaped electronic device that holds the outside a fetus develops the mother’s body.
Movie review
Running time: 101 minutes. Not yet rated.
It’s the hottest trend in New York – which will be clean, shiny and kind of spacious in a few decades! — and there’s an original iPhone-style waiting list for the privilege. For many there are only advantages: Ambitious people no longer have to take parental leave from the office or damage their figure.
Of course, like many hyped gadgets, Humpty Dumpty looks totally ridiculous. Expectant mothers awkwardly haul their unwieldy capsules in a harness on the subway and earn reproachful looks from real pregnant women.
But high-focused, bliss-seeking Rachel doesn’t care about raised eyebrows.
Coming to the enviable front of the line, she pressures her unknowing husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to sign up with the pod’s Stepford Wifey founder, Linda (Rosalie Craig). This is a difficult task. Alvy is a proud university botanist in a society that is phasing out the natural world (instead of hikes, people go in “natural pods”), and he’s skeptical of anything that defies humanity, like an Easy Oven for babies .
Emilia Clarke played Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones.
Despite this, he gives in and surprisingly begins to bond with the Digi-mother.
In the meantime, we’re getting nervous for more drama and less clever acting. Only a fraction of a thrill comes from Rachel’s smoldering insecurities as she struggles to forge a motherly connection with this idle womba resting on a glowing vacuum-style charger. It’s funny when she consults her artificial therapist, a giant floating eye positioned like a mad goddess in the center of a wreath. But for all her emotional turmoil, Rachel never raises her voice, and she and Alvy have no arguments.
Though Clarke doesn’t have much meat to chew on, she is solid and makes a statement that she can master both domesticity and dragons. However, Rachel feels a bit chilly. Ejiofor, who plays the charismatic Alvy, is easier to embrace as he voices all of our own doubts about this absurd situation.
Writer-director Sophie Barthes nobly resists the urge to succumb to an explosive dystopian ending à la Black Mirror, which is how her film otherwise feels. However, if we think of “Pod Generation” as a light comedy that pokes fun at issues as wide-ranging as Amazon’s Alexa and feuding feminist cults, we’ll tire of the monotony. The ending feels a lot more satisfying than it actually is.
A pretty obvious “Brave New World” “a-ha!” moment comes a while before that. In our ruthless pursuit of comfort, Barthes’ film suggests, we have handed over our intimate lives to corporations. Right now it’s dates; soon it could be birth.
That’s all well and good. But a film needs more than a clever idea and an impressively visualized concept for the future to run smoothly. After two-thirds of the run, The Pod Generation’s battery is already at 1%.