#sm-8

The movie takes place in the future of humanity. Our kind has conquered space, inhabiting other planets and space stations. Until an event that happened - roughly 20 years before the events of the movie - called the Quiet Rapture. Every star and planet in the universe disappeared, leaving behind only uninhabitable moons and the people living in the space stations.

There are two factions mentioned in the movie, among those remaining space stations. The Consolidation (or COI), and Eden. The COI is a group of stations, while Eden is a larger station. The COI discovered a moon in the remnants of the universe, which has an ocean of blood in it.

The protagonist of the movie, Simon, is a convict, sent down in a submarine called SM-13 to explore that ocean of blood. The moon is called AT-5. During his introduction, Simon is shown holding onto a knife holster strapped to his vest, the actual knife missing. He has a limited supply of oxygen, and the hatch to the submarine was welded shut once he entered it, to make it so the vessel could withstand the pressure of the blood. For the same reason, the porthole window is also closed by a metal protection.

Because the ocean is made of blood, Simon can't see out of the submarine, and needs to use a camera to see outside. The camera takes an x-ray, meaning it's extremely radioactive to what stands in front of it - as he found out when he took a picture of the hangar and irradiated 3 people. He's also at risk of being irradiated by the camera in small doses, and they compound with each photo as the movie goes on, meaning he irradiates himself over the course of it.

Simon and the COI personnel quickly find out the moon is inhabitted by living aliens - something unheard of since the Rapture. Simon finds a skeleton, and is sent back down to the ocean even after being pulled into the hangar, so he can get a bone sample. But remember how the camera only takes x-rays? The implied explanation is that the skeleton Simon found was a living creature. Once he collected the sample, another attacked him, losing his submarine in the depths and leaving him with one hell of a concussion. After that, he has to navigate while outside the charted map.

I will discuss the backstory now, because there's no way I can write this post lineraly with the movie, unless I want it to be a kilometer long.

Simon's original home was Eden, and the reason he's a convict is because he participated in the destruction of Filament Station, one of the COI space stations. 62 COI citizens died as a result of that crime, but despite turning himself in, Simon wasn't the one responsible for it. According to him, as the backstory is slowly revealed, he was the only one trying to stop it, but was framed for it. It's unclear when this was, and for how long has Simon been in prison for.

However, Simon still bears the weight of his own deeds from back on Eden. The station possessed a single tree when the Quiet Rapture happened - and that tree became the last one in the living universe when all that was left were the space stations. In the 20 years leading to the events of the story, Eden developed a death cult around keeping that tree alive - believing bodies must be fed to it, to keep it thriving. Simon was just a kid when he slaughtered the biggest ammount of people in the station to be given to the tree - which died anyway. It's shown his mother gave him a knife with which to do it, and that's the holster he still keeps, even though he doesn't have the knife anymore. You can see my full analysis of his backstory in this post.

Eden's religion seems to call it's followers "Brothers", and gives each of them a pendant with a seedling from the tree. The COI confiscated them from their Eden convicts, hoping to plant their own garden someday. Simon finds one of those seedlings hidden in the circuits of the submarine's computer, along with a message to cross the wires. The brother who left it there also left a recorded message, which Simon could listen to once he reactivated the computer.

OK, back to the concussion. Simon has to navigate the tunnels of AT-5, trying to find a way out, and he eventually comes face to face with the creature that attacked him before. A giant blood eel. But that eel is weird in a way that shouldn't be possible - it has a body made up of an amalgamation of human body parts. Some are growing along its body, like arms and legs. But if you pay attention, the entirety of the eel's design is comprised of human parts.

After the concussion and getting lost outside the map, Simon has to restart the submarine's engine. When he does, the porthole shield is lowered, and you can see those arms and legs passing by - as well as the image of an eye on it before the glass cracks.

In the sequence Simon supposedly re-establishes contact with a voice, a woman talking to him about the Light - he wonders if it's a hallucination. But the voice is real, it's the eel. The eel is an amalgamation of the SM-8 crew, who diednin the ocean. The SM-8 was a proper research vessel, piloted by two scientists. We know the voices from it are real and not a hallucination, because we hear them in the blackbox that Simon recovers from the SM-8 later.

There's something in the blood ocean, which the amalgamated voices of the eel both warn Simon about but also want him to see. What they describe as the Light is a god. A god whose perception of reality shapes reality. The pinhole line that is so famous in the fandom speaks about this god, who, not understanding what it sees, distorts reality to make it fit into what it sees.

Simon has an encounter with this God, in which some really trippy stuff happened, and he was probably Perceived in some way and then Perceived God back. But at the end of the day, he survives it, and is spat out the other side of the tunnel still alive. Even though it's been apparently days since his last contact with the COI and the oxygen should have ran out by then.

The captain from the COI, whose name we learn is Ava, informs him they can't go back for him, because they found out there are living creatures in the blood ocean that make it too dangerous to risk another dive. Simon tells her that he found the SM-8 wreckage, with its blackbox containing all its research about the Light and the ocean, the reason for the Quiet Rapture and possible salvation for humanity. Ava agrees to come get him back if he downloads that information into his own vessel's blackbox.

In that blackbox recording, we hear the voice of the lady who talked to Simon, who got amalgamated into the eel with her research assistant, proving she is real - especially because she calls for Ava, revealing her name before Ava even introduces herself. She also mentions the ocean is made of human blood, and that she doesn't want to synthesize food from it because something is wrong with it. Her assistant was heard drinking the blood.

Simon attempts to go back for the SM-8 blackbox, and successfully downloads it into his own submarine's database. But Ava's submarine, on her way to rescue Simon's, is caught and destroyed by the eel before she can save him. In her last transmission to him, she tells him to keep the blackbox safe.

Having completely lost all hope to be saved, but still fighting until his last breath, Simon retrieves the blackbox from the innards of his submarine, and wraps the lifevest he found around it. He seals the lifevest with the knife holster he carries. The Light looks into Simon's submarine, mutating everything it sees while trying to understand and assimilate him. He rips his own arm off trying to fight that assimilation.

The eel destroys his submarine, but he also destroys the eel. He's changed after his encounter with God, and even though he dies, he takes a part of God with him. Some theories point to him mutating into a tree once completely engulfed by the ocean. In any case, the last shot of his face shows his left eye glowing, and then we see the eel being destroyed while eating hthe SM-13.

The blackbox survives, floating to the surface due to the lifevest. The very last scene of the movie implies it's found by the COI's towship, as indicated by the light shining into it and the sound of an engine.

Many things are left unexplained, but there are enough things explained that the movie still makes narrative sense to me! And it's satisfying. I'm satisfied with it!

If you want to really dig into the unanswered questions, I have stuff I chewed on too! I'll link my iron lung meta tag, with the analysis posts I made and details I noticed. You can also correct me if you think any part of this post is either wrong, or mere headcanon, rather than implied information.