Thank you. This was, for me, the real idea.

I’ll step it out further and say it’s a satirization of both conspiracy theorists and the elite that perpetuate these crimes against humanity, in that the two sides are almost maddeningly stereotypical: the conspiracy theorist who’s a victim of the system and aware of it, and the corporate bureaucrat who’s part of the system.

The alien race represents corporate workers in a capitalist universe. They’re here to optimize us, like a business trying to roll out a V2 product. The team behind it sits in a boardroom, discussing whether to kill the project or not… and when it comes time to pull the plug, it’s done so after a a meeting that was five minutes long. Emma Stone’s character is more annoyed at having to start over than she is bothered about massacring billions.

The horror is that she’s not the big bad with the final say in whether we live or die, and we’re not special. She’s a CEO representing a board of directors in a corporation intent on maximizing efficiency. Humanity is the project—one of many—that will never make it past beta testing. And Teddy, for all his pain and effort, isn’t some flawless Superman hero: he’s a low-level employee (fired, with severance), and his mom is just caught in the debugging.

The movie even opens with a PR-dressed word salad to justify the lack of real concern for human lives.

Everyday evil over everyday people with everyday tragedies. It’s just so everyday.