Sundance Film Festival 2023: THE POD GENERATION & LANDSCAPE WITH INVISIBLE HAND

The two sci-fi films I saw at Sundance this year had some of the most interesting world-building premises I’ve seen in recent years. Though both of them fall short in writing and commentary, they offer some crucial and important talking points that are both social and political. While one comes from the voice behind Cold Souls and Madame Bovary, the other comes from the filmmaker who gave us Thoroughbreds and Bad Education.

The Pod Generation (Sophie Barthes)

What if you no longer have to carry a baby to term? What if there exists a technology that allows babies to be grown in an artificial womb aka a pod, so both members of the couple can enjoy the pregnancy together while still keeping themselves occupied with their work and lifestyles? That is what the Womb Center offers to privileged citizens in the near future.

Our lucky couple is Rachel (Emilia Clarke) and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has been on a waitlist for a long time before it’s finally their turn. Problem is Rachel kept this all a secret from Alvy. See, Rachel works at a high-tech company that is all about inventing next-generation AI to help users work more efficiently and conveniently. Alvy, on the other hand, is a botanist who teaches students about the natural world, something that is disappearing and becoming artificially replicated at an alarming rate. As you can guess, Alvy doesn’t support the idea of growing their baby in a detached pod.

But sadly, this early conflict is tossed aside in favor of world-building, to let the audience get a taste of the Womb Center’s entire process of growing a baby from conception to eventual birth. Through the impressive production design and a plethora of memorable visuals and concepts, The Pod Generation is filled to the brim with interesting ideas. Though writer/director Sophie Barthes performs admirably as a director of actors and atmosphere, her writing falls short. Having interesting ideas is one thing, but Barthes doesn’t pick a stance to commit to, in order to give her film a central message.

Once Rachel and Alvy are able to bring the pod home, and Alvy begins to bond with their baby, the film goes on cruise control and no longer challenges the characters. It’s a shame because the world Barthes has created is full of warning signs that are ripe with commentary. AI technology can make us lazy and unwilling to perform even the most basic things, and a company taking advantage of that while spinning a narrative of how the pod is “empowering” to people is just another disguise for capitalist greed. Though The Pod Generation arrives at a third act that is somewhat of a cathartic escape from such corporate power, the film could have and should have been angrier and more articulate with its attitude towards its world.

The film describes itself as a social satire, but I am convinced that an actual satire would make me not root for these characters. Rachel and Alvy are a perfectly healthy couple that would be perfectly capable of carrying a child together to term. The fact that the Womb Center never described its technology as helpful to women in terms of “health” and “infertility” is a glaring red flag as to how nonsensical this whole idea is. With pod technology, they essentially gamified parenting, and for that, we shouldn’t be rooting for couples like Rachel and Alvy.

But Barthes instead wants us to find our engagement with nature once again, to remember that life is beautiful and we should be one with our planet again. Though I admire and agree with this sentiment, it proves to be too soft and open-ended of a confrontation to the sci-fi premise she’s built for 109 minutes. The end result is a film that is gorgeous to look at but doesn’t know what to say or how to say it.

The Pod Generation premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Landscape With Invisible Hand (Cory Finley)

The more interesting alien movies are always the ones where the extraterrestrials are not here to take over the planet and annihilate the human race. That is the case with Landscape with Invisible Hand, an uncomfortable sci-fi comedy from Cory Finley, who has reveled in quirky dark territory with his past films.

Based on the novel of the same name by M.T. Anderson, the film takes place in a world where an alien race called the Vuvv have taken over Earth. No, not the hostile warmongering kind. The Vuvv are a peace-loving race of beings who came down to the planet and provided their advanced technology to work together with humans. The problem is such technology is so advanced and powerful that it has rendered most of human innovation obsolete, destroying the world’s economy.

Fast forward to today: Adam (Asante Blackk) is a young artist living with his sister (Brooklynn MacKinzie) and mother (Tiffany Haddish), struggling to get by financially. The world’s luxuries are now completely taken over by Vuvv technology. When Adam quickly becomes friends with Chloe (Kylie Rogers) and learns that she and her family are homeless, he invites them to stay at his house in the basement.

If you’re already sensing Parasite vibes from this premise, you’re not entirely wrong. Here, Finley creates three layers of “class.” You have Adam and his family in the middle, living in a house that they own. Then you have Chloe and her family, with no house of their own, as they live in Adam’s basement. Last but not least, you have the UFOs… err… cities that float in the sky. That’s where the Vuvv live. The experience is uncomfortable to say the least, and I didn’t even get to what the Vuvv look like yet – they look like snail-eyed gooey coffee tables made out of chewed bubble gum.

These disgusting looking things, which communicate in a bizarre language that involves furiously rubbing their hands together, are basic stand-ins for “the rich.” Though Finley nails that surreal tone of having to deal with economic oppression, he can’t quite nail whether his film is another “eat the rich” message or if it’s something else entirely. The world-building is a little less realized than one would hope. Tone is one thing, but the “rules” and the “systemic failings” need to be somewhat explored more in writing in order to fully understand what is at stake here.

Though Adam’s artistic sensibilities send him on a journey with the Vuvvs that flirt with ideas like colonialism and foreign propaganda, Finley’s writing gives Adam himself very little to work with on a character basis other than to react to things that happen to him and his family. The result is a film that sadly feels uneventful, maybe even a little inconsequential. But perhaps that is the point behind Landscape with Invisible Hand: Nothing substantial changes when you resist cold capitalism and oppression. That resistance just becomes another way of life.

As messy and thematically clunky as it is, Landscape with Invisible Hand held my attention from start to finish. Though Finley may have fallen a bit short on the writing this time (it’s certainly not as layered as Anderson’s world-building), he tackles the sci-fi genre with the same confidence in his previous films. By embracing the weird and the claustrophobic, the film may not be the most thematically articulate but it certainly has a lot of ideas on its mind that are worth discussing.

Landscape with Invisible Hand premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.