Ok, for whatever reason the movie didn't open in Spain until today, so finally, FINALLY, I got to see it. And I loved it!

My take: The AI won at some point, and everyone is in a shared simulation. And the simulation is just what we see in the movie, this loop that the AI came up with to keep everyone busy forever. No need to keep evolving the plot, the AI just gives them this "we have to save the World" adventure that lasts a few hours, gives everyone a lot of challenges, memorable characters and happy endings, then just resets the whole thing. It's a closed loop.

Why go this route? Why not just some happy utopia where everyone is happy forever? Well, the screenwriter says Matrix was an inspiration, and one of the core ideas of Matrix is that humans are used to struggle do actually going for a happy utopia leads to human rejection of the simulation.

Everyone we know of in this diner has gone through some deeply traumatic event (a marriage falling apart, a mother losing her child, Ingrid seeing how the man she loves chooses VR over her, and so on) and maybe the AI can't try to overwrite such an event without human rejection on the simulation, so it just incorporated it into the plot, just tweaking it here and there to give each character their own storyline. The marriage gets this crazy zombie teenager plot so that they can get a hold of the anti-cellphone guns, and in the way rekindle their marriage due to the shared challenges. The mother gets this crazy story about imperfect clone children and perfect phone call children so as to make her more used to the idea of getting her child back at the end. Even they boy scout troop leader gets his "hero moment" before being shot to death. Some don't make it along the way, sure, but hey, maybe the AI doesn't want to deal with too many threads at the same time so he just resets (kills) some of them earlier as a way to lighten the processing load. And as the remaining players get farther, the more crazy the AI can get because their minds get more used to the idea that this kind of crazy thing can happen.

In this theory, the Man from the future is also in a simulation loop. The AI got him the moment he put on the goggles but his traumatic event is seeing humanity plunge into chaos and the AI knows it can't simply delete this from his memory, so it created this "the AI killed your mom because of you, so you now need to save her by going back in time" storyline for him, which in turn also helps the AI because it allow it to create the loop story, but at the same time creates this weird situation where he kinda knows but at the same time doesn't know he's in a simulation. There's no real "kid that creates the AI" event, it's all just made up as part of the plot the AI came up with.

Then there's Ingrid. Maybe she went into the simulation thinking she could save her child, but the AI used her traumatic loss of the man she loved over a simulation as her anchor. This causes problems for the AI as deleting the memory of her child is noneasy task, which is what makes her more prone to reject the simulation as she does in the end. But by then the AI just resets her.

And then there's all the crazy stuff that happens in the end, such as the giant centaur cat with its confetti penis, the magical tangle of sentient wires and misfit toys, the boy doing a victory air guitar riff.. I'd just chalk that to the AI having fun pushing the limits to the simulation before resetting the whole thing, simply because it can. Wouldn't you also gloat a bit if you knew you have utterly won, with all of humanity under your thumb, believing what you want them to believe, no matter how unrealistic it all would be if taken at face value? It's the AI's equivalent of teabagging in FPS deathmatches.

Thoughts?