‘The Pod Generation’: Sundance's Sci-Fi Future Where Babies Are Hatched in Eggs

The act of biologically giving birth is a burden from which women must be—and are—liberated in The Pod Generation, Sophie Barthes’ film about a future marked by a high-tech service that lets humans have babies in smooth, glistening app-controlled eggs known as pods. These detachable wombs are a godsend for mothers who seek to prioritize themselves and their careers over their parturition duties, although they’re not without their downsides, as is soon learned by a couple that decides to procreate through this most modern of means.

Debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (where it’s already won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize), The Pod Generation is a social satire about both our dependence on the synthetic and about male and female attitudes toward parenthood. Its sci-fi conceit and imaginative world-building are, at least initially, intriguing.

The civilization envisioned by Barthes is one that views nature as an unwanted hindrance to be replaced, whenever possible, by technology. Thus, domestic and professional spaces are governed by knowledgeable virtual assistants, therapy is handled by AI psychiatrists, and interactions with the great outdoors take place via holograms and “nature pods” that simulate the sensation of being in the woods or at the ocean.

Read more at The Daily Beast.