Garland is basically taking a biological phenomenon and staging something similar to Fantastic Voyage, except instead of the scientists shrinking down to go inside someone’s body, the body they’re investigating is the Earth. Once Lena and the team are inside the Shimmer, they start noticing mutations, and those mutations represent cancer (the tumor at the heart of the Shimmer) affecting other cells. It’s not that cancer is inexplicable, but rather our understanding of it is still evolving. Yes, we can talk about risk factors, but there are perfectly healthy people who still get cancer. Everything is normal, and then it’s not, and in its place is something that’s mutating and, like The Shimmer, expanding. The unexplained phenomenon makes a good stand-in for how cancer strikes. We then cut back three years earlier when a mysterious something struck a lighthouse in the Southern Reach and that thing started expanding. She talks about cell division, particularly how cells rapidly divide and mutate. We immediately settle right into the movie's core metaphor right from Lena’s first lecture at Johns Hopkins.
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