WARNING: I DON’T RECOMMEND READING THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET.

Prepare for my terrible attempt in sounding intelligent.

We humans are quite used to being top dog on this Earth by now. We rule over nature, nature bends to our will. After all, why shouldn’t we? We know the most about the world, what to use, and what to avoid. Everything is within our intellectual grasp.

So when an extraterrestrial comet strikes the planet, transforming what previously was an environment well-known to us into something completely alien…it changes things. Suddenly we’re not in full control of the world anymore. Suddenly we have an area of the Earth, our domain, that has the potential to swallow us completely without us being able to do anything about it.

Naturally, we can’t have that. So we send in drones, soldiers, scientists, anything that can help us understand and contain this new phenomenon.

And how well does that turn out? About as well as our current government.

The moment the scientists step foot in the Shimmer, they are lost, completely shut off from what they know. they come across anomaly against anomaly, all the while doing their best to survive. And yet they fall away, one by one, as the continued abnormality of the place crushes their body and minds. This is too strange of an uncharted area for even us, who conquered the goddamn moon, to conquer.

And think about what the Shimmer is doing to the environment around it. It’s mutating it, changing it into its own world. Now, we may see that as horrifying, but consider this; think about a colony of ants or a ticket of bushes living their lives. Now consider the grass suddenly replaced by concrete, metal behemoths driving by, earsplitting sounds filling the air, giants stomping by…

Suddenly, the expansion of the Shimmer doesn’t seem that far off from what we are doing to nature under pretense of “urbanization.”

Yet I don’t consider this a “humanity is sh*t, etc.” type of story. Otherwise the movie wouldn’t have showed us anything except for the scientists screaming, crying, and completely losing their minds at the smallest thing. Instead, they try to survive. They fight back. They continue to try and explore.

What they discover in the Shimmer isn’t despair, but rather, realization. Realization that we, who thought were the destined rulers that had the right to do whatever we wanted with the world…

…are in the end, just a part of that very nature.

The Shimmer isn’t necessarily interested in destroying humanity. It’s just doing what nature does – Survive. Adapt. Expand. We may have pegged it as hazardous, but in the end, area X is what the rest of nature is like – neutral.

In a sense, the Shimmer is like cancer to us – a completely alien type of nature slowly taking over. However, from the cancer’s perspective, it’s just doing what nature does. That’s not to say cancer isn’t an atrocious thing in real life, but in terms of this analogy, it is simply a different type of cell.

There is no true right or wrong here. There’s just nature and its parts interacting with each other. The film simply wants to knock us down a peg, rather than crush us completely. We are not the rulers. Nobody is. It’s just that we are better at trying to ignore that fact.

This also helps explain the ending, which might just be one of the most confusing endings I’ve seen in cinema. Natalie Portman comes across a…thing; it absorbs her blood and creates a T-1000 out of it. It plays copycat with Portman, then Portman burns it, it burns the lighthouse, destroys the Shimmer, and Oscar Issac and Natalie Portman hug while their eyes glow.

It threw me into a massive loop, partly why this review took me so long despite me promising it will be out in a few hours.

See, the Shimmer mutates everything, or rather, assimilates everything into its own type of nature. However, at the basis of all that is the basic duplication, just like a cell. The image of mitosis is repeated consistently throughout the movie, and it’s not the normal type; it’s that of a cancer cell or a cell that is changing due to the Shimmer.

With everything around the source of the shimmer, around the lighthouse, the Shimmer simply refracts DNA, changing everything. However, at the source is simple duplication, just like a cell. The biologist, when she reaches the source, becomes a part of that duplication process. Something vaguely similar yet different from her is created from her.

(Ugh, my head.)

But why would the Shimmer do this? And why did Lena and Kane at the very end seem different?

Like I said, the Shimmer is simply trying to survive and adapt. And considering what was top dog on Earth before its arrival, it has chosen what would be the best for its evolution. It needed a human that was strong enough to come close to the lighthouse; natural selection will decide who that will be. And it has gotten someone – Kane. The Kane that was born from the source now has the capabilities of a human, yet is part of the shimmer. In a sense, it is the next step the Shimmer took in its evolution.

Again, humanity isn’t portrayed as either the best or the worst here. The Shimmer is simply indifferent; it simply chose an organisms that had the skills and intellect to reach the source. It could have been a dog, a bear, an insect for all that we know. It’s just that Kane reached the source first.

(And are we sure that it was Kane who reached it first? That’s what we see and assume, but who knows, maybe a butterfly living near the lighthouse got to the source, and now there is a Shimmer-born butterfly flying around out there now.)

But Kane isn’t enough. He is still one person, and he cannot be the next part of the Shimmer’s evolution and expansion if he cannot reproduce. So the Shimmer sends him back. Back to the person that cares for him, will be the right mate for him, and will go into the Shimmer herself to save him.

Once Lena reaches the lighthouse, the Shimmer’s work is complete. Lena born from the Shimmer joins Kane as the part of the Shimmer.

“But didn’t Lena escape the lighthouse at the end?”

Well she could have; we don’t know what exactly happened after the lighthouse burned down. But even if the original Lena made it out, it wouldn’t have made a difference; the Shimmer would have done enough of its mutation on her for her to be a suitable mate for what calls himself Kane.

And in the end, the two join. Once the Shimmer has taken its step in evolution, it doesn’t need its expansion process anymore. The organisms it put out, the organisms that have the best chance of spreading the Shimmer’s environment throughout the world due to their status as a human, will do the rest.

To us, that might be a bad thing, but again, it’s all perspective. To the Shimmer, it’s just surviving. It’s nature. And we humans are a part of it. Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s quite a biblical ending in a sense as well; a man and a woman, born from their paradise, goes out beyond their birthplace and starts spreading into the world. It has its ups and downs, but it’s ultimately a process. In face of what God did with Adam and Eve, we are not to say anything, because it’s not our role. With what the Shimmer did, we have no right to condone or condemn it.

It’s not our destruction; it’s its evolution.

…dear god, what did I write?