Er... contaminated area and yet they send in teams with no protective suits?
No spacesuits, no hazmat suits? How dumb is that?
share"contaminated area"
says who?
MovieChat Forums > Annihilation (2018) Discussion > Er... contaminated area and yet they sen...
its pretty simple..they tried it all..if you look at the gear from previous expeditions...they have everything...yet no one came out..so they are basically going up against something they dont know..so whats the point in trying everything that's been tried before...its a supervised expedition with new trials...its not some scenario where these people are sneaking in...if you look at the beginning when they are entering the shimmer...there are helicopters and all kinds of army outfit looking at them as they enter the shimmer.
share... that seems like a good reason to totally disregard all safety measures .......?
shareThey had done that and the result conviced them not to send the team with any protective suits. Why didn't we see that part in the movie? Because it is obvious to almost every audience that it should be the first thing the scientist would try, so the director decided not wasting time to show those previous failures. Instead, we can guess that from the conversation - Antress told Lena that they did all kinds of experiments, but "nothing" comes back. And when Lena corrected her that something had come back, Ventress confirmed but her face expression suggests she was hiding some terrifying facts that they learnt. (Because she was expecting Lena to volunteer for the expedition). Another reason to skip those experiments is that showing a decayed corpse in the protective suit might mislead the audiences to think the Shimmer is such a extremely hostile environment that even the protective suit won't help. Which is very wrong. On the contrary, those protective suits would cause them to die very quickly becasue the Shimmer is not a contaminated environment but like a culture medium to nurse and support lifes self-sustaining in it's different time demention. This is implied at the very beginning of the movie, the first and the second dialogues - "What did you eat?" - "I don't remember eating.". - "How long did you think you were inside?" - "Days. Maybe weeks."
shareNah. Don't buy that, sorry.
shareThat's OK. I just want to share my appreciation, hate to see a good movie wasted.
And, you are right to be skeptical. Simply pointing out that the Shimmer isn't a hostile environment is not the whole truth, since we ignored the aliens' motivation behind it. From the moment we saw a "meteorite" hit the lighthouse and hid itself underground, we should be alert. They were not as innocent as Lena described, they were here to study lifes on earth specially human. The Shimmer was just a big alien lab to do experiment of all aspects - engineering genes modification between plant, animal and human; duplicating human consciousness; playing psychological warfare, altering human personality, testing human's social and intimate relationship, etc. The Shimmer is a friendly environment to lifes just like in our lab, we keep lab rats healthy in a good environment in order to do further experiment. But don't be naive, the aliens did eliminate any one who go in there to threaten them.
So, if Antress and the authority knew all of that, why did they send a team without protection in the Shimmer to become lab rats? Here is my take on that, which you are free to disagree. It is because the alien are too advanced, people can't fight the extraterrestrial intelligence who are able to break the laws of physics. Nothing could protect the explorers if the alien want to take them down. Since all previous attemps failed, Antress was desperate and took a new approach- took advantage of the Shimmer's friendly to lifes and the alien's interest on studying "Damanged goods" nonthreatening female scientists, fight it with not resistence but acceptance. In the end, Antress accepted to be part of the aliens, and then used her remaining but fading consciousness, collabarated with Lena's consciousness in the duplicate and successfully burnt the lighthouse. Before the burning, the aliens had already sent all information towards the sun after knocked Lena down. Mission accomplished, for both sides.
It didn't stop Alien Covenant from being an entertaining movie...
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