At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes
im also obsessed with the interpretation of the blood ocean not being inherently evil or malevolent, in fact, it starts off rather loving. or at least, what it perceives to be loving. it wants simon to become part of it. it could've absorbed the iron lung and mutated it so long ago - we saw how quickly things went to shit in the final act. but its slow, always there in the corner for simon to be constantly aware of it, like a friend letting you know theyre always in your corner. it keeps the oxygen supply going despite the fact it should've run out days ago. it throws him into the cave. it talks to him, tries to entice him to join in anyway it can. come see the truth, it could save you, it has the answers you've been looking for. if that doesn't work, maybe guilt tripping is the answer, reflect on filament station, simon. "i see you". an acknowledgement. simon runs out of tape so the blood mutates to hold the photograph button for him. but the more defiant simon becomes, the more focused on his own survival he is, the angrier the ocean becomes. the creature couldve swallowed him so many times. clearly the radiation isn't actually a threat to it, we see it being blasted so many times in the end, but it continues its chase after him once it kills ava. the creature backing off in the caves after the photograph was a conscious decision. it couldve lashed out right then and there, but it backed off. "hey, im not a threat, im just watching, im right here for when you're ready".
just like eden, just like the COI, the ocean tries to force simon into a life he never really wanted. because he never seems to get a choice.
i just can't stop thinking about an ocean that thinks itself benevolent, when really, its just as cruel as the rest of humanity. or maybe, its humanity that is as cruel as nature. or is it a God? does it even matter?
I think Iron Lung deserves to be Oscar nominated for the makeup and I'm completely serious. Tiny splashes of blood he didn't know to clean off because he doesn't have a mirror slowly turn into burns and then holes in Simon's head and you don't notice at all until it's too late. You think, oh, that must have been a burn all along, I guess, that's why it was still there. The bandages get bloodied, and then bloodier from the inside. Keeping makeup like that consistent at all is already a nightmare and they made it an arching plot point. The only makeup job I didn't care for was at the very, very end, and it's for the usual "building on top of because you can't take away from the surface" reasons, it's completely fine from this size production.
Spoilers and some pretty gory images are going under the cut
Echo Duemig, production sound mixer, shared some bloody movie shots from his computer monitor.
Erika Slay, costume designer, shared this image with the caption that it is "a costume mutation that happened late in the film". She said she'll be posting more costume design images soon, which I know us fans have been begging for!
David Szymanski, original creator of the Iron Lung game, also posted these very gory and chunky detailed shots from the set.
Actually, rewatching the ending of Iron Lung, I think I finally understand what happened.
The final shots we see of Simon show him being assimilated by the blood ocean. We hear Simon's screaming gradually distort into a roar, and there are fang-like teeth growing on the side of his face:
The blood is mutating him into another monstrous fish. This implies the voice speaking to Simon had once been human too, but had since become the monster we've seen throughout the film, having burst out of (not bitten into) the SM-8.
The voice says, "We can save everyone, within us!!" which makes sense if we recall the line from earlier in the film about the blood ("It's us"). It's stated that the blood is human blood, and may even be what remains of the humans that were taken in the Quiet Rapture. As people (like the woman from the SM-8, and like Simon now) are sent down into the blood ocean, are irradiated, and mutate, they are absorbed into a sort of hive-mind connection with the blood itself. (It's sort of an antithesis to the repeated refrain of "It's bigger than us"...no, it literally is us.) Simon and the ship are already part of it--an iron lung, built by what is found in blood (perhaps distilled from it) and refilled with oxygen as if the blood is a body using it to breathe.
Then we follow Simon under the surface of the blood and see the following shots (I've taken down the saturation for clarity). The tree pendant cracks and shoots out tendrils:
Simon resurfaces, and his eye (below) flashes and changes color, becoming more like the giant eye we've seen throughout the film. His mutation seems to be progressing.
It cuts to black and the voice says, "We live." Then it cuts to an exterior shot of an explosion, ripping through the monster, and dark shapes start to shoot out from the center of where the ship had been.
Some people have interpreted this as the completion of Simon's transformation, but it isn't. This isn't a fish or even a tentacled sea creature. It's a tree. The trunk is the upper portion, and the roots are the tendrils spreading out towards the screen.
Simon's choice to hold onto hope allowed what was intended for evil to be used for good. The piece he carried of the Last Tree touched the blood, and, as if to fulfill what Eden had said ("our bodies will become the soil"), used it to grow, destroying the monsters as it did. The blood can nourish something now ("we live"), as it is meant to, even if (just as with the data) we don't get to see what it becomes.
Simon is gone, but the Last Tree lives again. And thanks to him, maybe humanity can too.
Okay, having watched the movie a second time, I was really paying attention to the flashbacks. Plus the sound was really crisp this time around. I have a few notes I can make. This is the full extent of what we actually get to learn about Simon in the movie. Full analysis and spoilers under the cut.
Four main scenes I take this from: the flashback right after the concussion, the flashback when he falls asleep at the control panel, the storm of voices after he regains contact with Ava and she sents him to retrieve the black box, and finally, the ending sequence.
In what I perceive the order of events to go, Simon was born on a planet, not on Eden station. In the storm of voices, we hear his mother saying "c'mon, it has a tree! It'll be just like home. Simon, don't be like that." implying he moved to Eden at an early age.
In the flashback scene with the tree, we see the planets disappearing in real time before their eyes. So, the young actor for Simon is how old he was when the Rapture happened. A fun detail is that in the game no one was actually looking at the planets and stars when they faded, so this is a divergence between the movie and the game, cementing what Szymanski said about them being different continuities.
Shortly after that, Eden Station festered a defeatist death cult, probably because they had the last trees and plants alive. Simon's mother joined in, so he joined in as well, he was just a kid after all, listening to the adults in his life. Then again, I find it interesting that the voices at the end say his mother wouldn't recognize him after he became a killer - then in the same breath say death was all she taught him.
We know Eden has a religious/spiritual motif going on, with that preaching Father, with how Simon calls other Eden people "brothers", how they all get a pendant with a germinating seed, and the tattoo and X/cross motifs that we see across the movie. Simon's tattoo was shaped like an X (you can see where it was burnt off in some parts of the movie), and when he finds the pendant in the terminal, there was a little paper or tape X attached to it and the message.
The tree died at some point, but they said it would live again, because when there is no more soil, their bodies would become the tree's soil. I don't know when this was, but it might have been before little Simon killed all those other kids (or adults? I think they were kids his age). A friend of mine pointed out they were trying to return the universe to nature in the absence of humans, preparing and making way for the plants to come. "Add a little ecofascism as a treat".
Simon, as a child, slaughtered a lot of people in the name of the cult, so much he had the highest body count and was nicknamed "Simon the Butcher". He received a knife and holster from his mother, and he still owns the holster. He keeps it in his vest/shirt, and can be seen rubbing it under his hands for comfort at the start of the movie.
But as Simon grew up, he wanted to escape the cult. He still somewhat agreed with Eden that there was no point in humanity trying to stay alive - given his line to Ava that "Eden didn't delude themselves with hopes for survival if everyone believes enough". But he eventually grew up enough to disagree with the cult. He wanted to live, and he wanted others to live, in his own rebel way.
When Eden invaded Filament Station, he tried to stop it from being destroyed, and in doing so, took all the blame for it. 62 people from Filament died, not counting anyone from Eden. He surrendered, no questions asked. He appears as an adult in that flashback of watching the soldier die in fire, indicating it wasn't long ago. Ava was in charge of him as a convict, as we see in the storm of voices scene.
Another difference from the game is that the movie explicitly states Filament Station was destroyed, when in the game it was rendered uninhabitable due to a breach in the reactor core, which, wouldn't you guess it, leaked radiation everywhere.
Some lines he says later on to the Speaker, about everyone blaming him for Filament, give me the idea he still thinks that was his only guilt, or his only blame. He seems in denial of the blame of killing the other kids. Maybe he's repressing it, clinging to an idea of being innocent, or maybe he doesn't think he's to blame when he was manipulated into a cult as a kid?
I find it hard to connect that little butcher to the Simon we know in the movie, someone who even apologized to the control panel of the submarine after he punched it.
"Simon the Butcher, lost his nerve" was told to him by a brother from Eden, whoever the guy who told him to cross the wires was. He implied that after everyone Simon killed as a child, he lost his bravery and devotion to death once he was in Filament Station.
At the end of the movie, I think he puts the knife holster in the life-vest? It was hard to see, so I really am not sure, all I have is someone else's words, who also saw the movie. But at the end there, he does say "oh please, keep this safe, okay mom? It's more than me." Thanks to the good audio, I heard he said mom, there.
Edit after someone commented: he indeed uses the holster to tie the life-vest around the blackbox.
And, that's about the extent I could gather of Simon's past and backstory in movie continuity.
Update: omg y'all thanks so much for the response to this post. I'm really glad I could contribute to you as a lore guide.
I know we’re all talking about the harness scene (for good reason I mean hello??? I think my brain stopped during it) but I also think we need to talk about him running back and forth between the controls and the map with the pencil in his mouth and his hair falling perfectly and that concentrated frown and the lighting and ughhhhhhhhshhsjdjjceiogovnekvkdkc someone throw me into the light portal I need to become one with the eldricht being at the bottom of this fucked up ocean just to cope
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