Ending??

The camera is still tracking what's happening, so you know they're being monitored by someone even at the end.

They are also watched by night vision (green) in Tranquility, by people behind the scenes who must have more tech. than the townspeople they meet.

The lights come on, they're congratulated at the end of 400 days. So it had to be an OTT big budget extreme simulation. At least one person died (Zell), which is the shocker if it was a simulation.

The 2 missing crew members were presumably safely removed from play, as you never actually saw them die, they just disappeared when they went behind the scenes.

But I'm still left with the thought that maybe it wasn't a simulation, and the final video was a pre-recorded message, and it's more townspeople coming down the hatch. Even they don't know for sure. Paranoia, and not being totally sure at the end makes a good movie for me.

It was supposed to be an ambiguous ending.

The ending was supposed to implied that, the world either did end and the outside is filled with crazy people out to kill the protagonists or the experiment ended on schedule but the protagonist turned crazy and refuse to leave the "ship".

It was done rather poorly to be honest.

I enjoyed it even with the ending. It left a lot of questions, sure, but I liked that.

Though, I was hoping at the end after the 'Congratulations' speech/recording and the hatch opened that they would pan over and discover that the man Theo strangled was Bug and that Zell was actually Dvorak. Meaning they all (or even just Theo and Emily) had been hallucinating and that they never really left the 'ship'. Then cut to credits and you would be left wondering what happened still but it would at least have given it more direction.

I'm no director though, so what do I know?

There are 2 crucial things that take place during the film.

Inside the bunker there is a psychological experiment taking place to push the participants to their limit. There is like a 200+ day jump at one point when tension between the parties is high, to suddenly day 374. The cameras no longer pan and track after this jump and very many strange things begin to occur.

Outside the bunker some sort of event took place. A large object DID strike the moon and showered the earth with particulate, contaminating the earth and water supply and atmosphere. The survivors live on a very low oxygen level making them susceptible to similar conditions of the experiment. They are not completely lucid, highly paranoic and given to hallucination.

This is why no one is sure how to react to a couple of people walking around their town in space suits. They aren't sure if it's even there.

I say 'a couple' cause several things don't add up. The disappearance of the other crew members and the significant time jump during a high-tension period. I think the experiment had already failed, and the 'vessel' had suffered an environmental leak for a long time. Something happened, the other 2 test subjects either left containment or were killed in some incident inside, due to psychological stress and oxygen deprivation. The 2 remaining crew simply hallucinated/inserted them back into their scenario so it made sense.

I think the other crew members simply left containment, that's why no one in the town was particularly surprised by the suits. That's why there was a map 'looking for something'.

When Dane Cook's character disappears, Routh's character starts overturning the diner looking for camera's and microphones while reciting Cook's character's previous lines. This reinforces that Cook was never there, and it was always only Routh's character. 'Zell' isn't lieing, there was only ever two of them. There is similar mirroring between the psychologist and Bug.

I also believe part of the psychological assessment was to determine how quickly people lose track of time. I think the participants were in the vessel for much longer than 400 days.

Bug asks, "What time is it?..." kinda vacantly. Suggesting he has lost absolute track of time. The psychologist strides in and wants them to play a game of memory, 'Emily's temporal mono-mental chronometry task that infers perception and duration of cognitive operation'

I dunno, doesn't sound like Memory, sounds like she intends to test the participants for their temporal awareness.

Edit: I do think the film is sloppy, but there was a good idea in here, it was just executed very badly. Had a pretty decent cast to draw from, especially coming from Syfy, and did appear to want to be a hard sci-fi film. Rocky start.

I'll go against the grain, as I like the ambiguity. Definitely keeps you guesing, and reading the theories about it has only made it more interesting to me.

The main thing that led me to believe it was staged and Emily was in on it was when she comes to Theo's aid with a med kit after he is stabbed, and Theo points out that the med kit she is using was not from the ship and presumably given to her by someone else.

It's literally impossible to know. No matter what scenario we want to go with, the movie directly contradicts those ideas.

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