how were some of the rooms in the hotel heated, and also appear to have electrical power? in one scene, one character says to another "you're lucky, you have a warm room" and in another, the paul newman character flips a switch and a light comes on. i realize it was the future but it appeared all sources of power had been exhausted.
sharemagick
sharethey had limited power, but not enough for a heater.
shareThis new Ice Age has settled in at some point in the not-too-distant future...it is not unreasonable to guess that, by that point in time, public places like hotels could rate small, clean nuclear generators ( although obviously, the questing spread of the ice has caused the power transmission to become erratic in spots ).
share You know, I never thought about that...here's something else, too: Altman said he 'didn't really know if this was future earth or another planet or what", so maybe the science is beyond us anyway; for that matter, maybe it's SOLAR power, which would explain the low energy output (darker sky)...and the other sources were simply used up.
In the end, however, this story is about symbolism....the search of exeter is the search of the soul...his wife's name is 'vivia', that means 'life'....Gregor is clearly the devil, never doing evil but inspiring it....(even the game is a 'pentagon'!) theres nothing to do in life but 'play the game'....so the soul, disallusioned by life and lack of 'sense', chooses to go back to the 'oblivion' it knew before these events....Vivia is the symbol of innocent life, the 'soul' simply tries to make sense of it and fails....because there's no 'sense' to life except what you make.