story in a nutshell

I've been reading the forums... Sooo many people left befudled by the ending and wether it meant this or that... Wow... was it REALLY that confusing?

So let me go through it quickly:

A private company runs a psychological test with 4 civilian candidates... They go in, start the test and all's going fine.

On day 27, Something happens and the Solar Panels go bust (not completely dead tho) and they seemingly lose communication with the "boss". So they assume it's part of the test and continue their 400 days.

Nearing the end of their run, 2 things happen, oxygen starts getting thin, so they start having issues with that (halucinations, headaches, etc) on top of the psychological issues each were having. Second thing that happens is that they hear someone trying to enter the "ship", and then they find some weird messed up dude inside stealing their food.

They decide to go out. When they go out they're on a perpetual "night-time" earth, cold, no trees, thin oxygen BUT they can still see the sun, albeit very darkened, like looking at it through vry dark sun-glasses.

They eventually get to a town with survivors, 2 of them "disappear", the 2 others are followed to ship and attacked there. Then the test finishes, they get a pre-recorded message and the hatch opens again and the movie ends.

What's complicated about this? Clearly the people in the town are cannibal survivors. They leave the lights "on" to attract other survivors so they can feed on them (since there would be little or no animals or plants left after 378 days of no sunlight). That Zell guy is the "leader", and he explains what happened:

Something hit the moon, either destroying it or banging it badly, that moon debris and dust fall to earth and it covers the atmosphere and obviously the world went to the crapper at that point, but there's no reason why a lot of people wouldn't survive... It wasn't like a lethal radiation kind of scenario.

Also: The town people let the guy and the chick escape so they could bring them back to their "ship" where they're obviously hoping to find a nice warm shelter and maybe some useful supplies.

The thing at the end? Well, Zell was planting a flag on the "ship" site so others would be able to find it... And we're left to asume that they did, and they were coming with reinforcements, and d'uh! LIGHTS... Zell and the other 2 followed them in the dark obviously, but a larger group of people would follow with lights.

Honestly it all seemed pretty straightforward to me, even though of course, since it was a "pyschological" experiment it's meant to be a bit mysterious... But, eh, come on...

Anyways, I liked the movie for what it was, meaning a low sci-fi budget movie with an interesting premise. Yes, some things could've been made a bit better/clearer and the ending was definetly trying too hard to seem "open-ended", but it wasn't as terrible as people make it seem.