Settlers is available on these streaming services:
Settlers Movie Walkthrough and Ending Explained. Look. Do a movie a little bit differently? I’m in. The French Revolution on a submarine? Sure, even though you just described underwater Snowpiercer. Or what about a film noir, detective story, set in a high school? (You guessed it, that’d be Brick.) Harder one… how about a political drama about dueling political parties fighting over limited resources, and a valuable spice? (DUNE!) Anyway… flipping the script, changing things up, always breathes new life into an old story. Today’s flipped script is an old western… set on Mars. And with those last three words, it changes the entirety of the story. Its meaning, its repercussions, its raison d’etre.
The film sort of rings like the movie the Wind, so if you dug that, maybe? It tells the story of a Mars AFTER cities and civilizations have come and gone on Mars. It tells the story of settlers with nowhere to go. It tells the story of people scrabbling, clawing, and scratching at the dust… doing their very best to try and survive.
Settlers Movie Walkthrough
The movie opens with Reza (played by Jonny Lee Miller), Ilsa (Sofia Boutella), and Remmy (Brooklynn Prince) who are scratching out a life on the hard side of a Martian mountainside. When one day, the word LEAVE is written on the side of their dwelling. When violence erupts, it looks almost as though Reza and Ilsa will get the upper hand, dropping several strangers before hunkering down again. But when Reza goes out to investigate, and never comes back, things swing wildly out of control.
Jerry (Ismael Cruz Cordova) arrives, and informs Ilsa and Remmy that they are living in his home. That he has traveled vast distances to return, and that he planned to restore the estate to what it once was. But Ilsa? She stabs Jerry in the leg in an attempt to get him off of their land. Jerry makes Ilsa a deal, in 30 days, he will put his gun on the table… and she can do what she wants with it. And on day 27, they seem to make peace. Maybe more than peace. But then on day 30, as promised, Jerry puts the gun on the table. And they live happily ever after. The farm blossoms, and the mechanicals are all repaired! Hallelujah! Peace!
No. Ilsa pulls the gun off the table, and pulls the trigger, hoping to kill Jerry. You see, Remmy has not adjusted well to the interloper. She has taken it as a slight from her mother that she has traded Jerry for her father. And so Ilsa has attempted to restore the situation by killing Jerry. But, as the gun wasn’t loaded… she ran for the knife. Remmy, ran outside, and the tousling, and wrestling could be heard from outside the shelter. But who won? And when Jerry walked out of the shelter, stabbed in the arm, Remmy knew her mother was dead.
Interestingly, when Remmy was younger, and her mother was in full betrayal mode, Remmy ran for it. She ran as far as she could, but was stopped by some sort of barrier. A clear, shinning barrier. And there was a portal, a door, of some sort nearby. A door that Remmy walked through, and there was a tunnel on the other side. But before she could get through, she passed out… she couldn’t make it to the end. And when she woke up, her mother had brought her home. What was it? What is going on here?
Leap forward 10 years. Ten solid years without her mother, or father. Ten years of coexisting with her parent’s murderer. Picking tomatoes, tending to the pigs, going about the work of surviving in this hardscrabble existence. Ten years of not talking to each other. Living side by side. But constantly – living in silence. It’s enough to send anyone to the funny farm. And it basically does. But after a few kindnesses from Jerry, the ice starts to break between Jerry and Remmy. And when Jerry gives Remmy a drawing he had done of Remmy’s mother, they embrace. She was crying after all… but was she crying because she was just given a photo of her mother by her mother’s murderer?
Then Jerry tried to kiss Remmy. His charge, if not his daughter. This is not going in the right direction – like at all. But it’s okay, because it gets even worse really fast. When she heads back to her room, she finds him there, with her hidden gas mask that she stole from his supply. You know, the supply of gas masks that he burned after arriving. (“When he reached the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result his men were well motivated.”) But when Jerry shoves the gas mask in her face and vehemently explains how she will die with the mask on, gagging, and suffocating under the plastic mask, he hits her and knocks her unconscious.
When Remmy wakes though, she finds herself tied to the bed. And Jerry? He is determined to help the planet out… to continue the planet like Adam and Eve. Or maybe he’s just looking for sex where he can find it. It’s unclear. Remmy is tied up. Defenseless – oh, and Jerry has pulled a gun on her as well. Remmy is now hyperventilating. Off to the side though is a whirring and clicking. The AI bot that helps with work around the station is standing in the doorway. And the next thing Jerry knows, it’s pulling out its rock fragmenter tool, and it fires it at Jerry, hitting him in the neck. Now Jerry is bleeding out, he may or may not survive it. Remmy though is standing in the room, pointing her father’s rifle at Jerry. “We need each other.” “I don’t see it that way.” And she fires, killing Jerry instantly with a bullet in his forehead.
Here’s the question though. What is Remmy going to do now that she is all alone, under this dome, out in the middle of nowhere out on a dying planet. Well, unsurprisingly, she grabs her gas mask, packs her stuff up, and heads out to the tunnel. And this time, she’s able to make it out of the tunnel, and out to the other side… out into the open territory of Mars. And as she looks around, seeing nothing for miles and miles, the door closes behind her. The end. Wait, what?
Settlers Movie Ending Explained
Wait, how could that be the ending? What does it even mean? Let’s start back at the beginning and see if we can untangle it. Jerry, was born and lived as a child under this martian dome, which provided air on the hostile planet. Eventually, he was drafted, and went to war on earth. While off at war, Ilsa and Reza arrive on Mars, escaping the chaos of earth. They are eventually allowed to stay under Jeremy’s family’s dome. Jerry’s family figure out that Ilsa and Reza are from earth, a scuffle starts, and Ilsa kills Jerry’s father. (Not 100% why that is bad… maybe there are Planetary-isms where Martians believe that they are better than people from Earth?) Regardless, they take over the dome. But as the dome is unlocked… and freely accessible, anyone brave enough to adventure out on to the surface of Mars can access the dome.
And it’s very clear that Jerry did just that in order to arrive back at his parent’s dome. And he traveled with his “wife” and a friend. When they arrived at Jerry’s parent’s home, he found intruders here in his childhood home. But when they attack the station, I’m sure Jerry was confused to see that his wife, and friend were murdered by the station intruders. Reza shoots Jerry in the ankle, but when Reza goes to the ridge to check Jerry’s body, he is shot and killed. Later, when Remmy goes to the door of the dome, she passes out from a lack of oxygen… and her mother finds her, and brings her back home.
Remmy, knowing nothing about the world she is living in has to take a bet as to whether or not they are the last people on Mars, or on the possibility that there might be other domes, other settlers, other people out there. Other people better than Jerry anyway. And so, after killing Jerry, she takes the gas mask, the oxygen, and some supplies, and heads off into the horizon, looking for absolutely anything other than this. Which sort of surprised me. I was actually pretty certain that A) they were on Earth. and B) the whole Mars thing was just a lie, or some sort of simulation to prepare to go to Mars. That maybe it was a test dome, among a sea of test domes, and they’d all been forgotten. I thought the movie’s ending would look something a little more like this… so what gives?
Well, even though Remmy isn’t on earth, and even though there is nothing to be seen, we actually have some hope for her that she isn’t heading out on a suicide mission. Why? Well, as I mentioned from my walk through of what actually happened, we do know that Jerry traveled there from Earth, then across the planet to find his childhood dome. And therefore, we know that there are other domes out there. I do sort of wonder, did he originally arrive at a different dome after the war? And then did he, his wife, and friend flee a habitat that had died? He talks about how the sky is turning bluer, and as a result, the air was beginning to give way, and eventually their lives would be extinguished. (So, why exactly was he so gung ho to propagate again? I’m confused. I just think the Adam/Eve scenario was just an excuse. He was just happy enough to propagate with any nearby woman. He didn’t grieve his “wife” who was killed by Ilsa. Not even a little.)
I think though that Remmy’s rejection of the standard tropes – women, bear children – turns the tables on the standard archetypes and that is the larger point of this movie. To flip the tables on a survivalist agenda that would make it okay to be raped by her caregiver. Yeah, I’m not about that either. And even the end of the human race (which probably isn’t the case) isn’t going to change her mind. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I’m realizing that Jerry was playing Remmy. And I don’t care what you say in the comments… nothing is going to change my mind on this front.
Thoughts on the Movie Settlers
This movie isn’t going to be for everyone. Personally, I loved it. The slow beat of it. The world building. That robot?! The habitat. The setting? It was all perfect. The acting was a little suspect. But the writing and the conflict was fascinating. I really loved this world, and wanted to stay… just to visit a while longer. (I’ve thought about how could it would be to have a two-hour movie about living in a cool environment like this. Just people coming and going. Tending to the pigs. Working on the shelter. Zero plot. Zero conflict. Just conversations about life, the universe, and everything. 100% world building and soaking it in. I know cool, right!? Okay, so all of your ideas aren’t perfect. Hush.) The way that the screenplay just ruthlessly worked its way through character after character. They way it was killed off two strangers… then Reza… then Ilsa… then Jerry… til it was only Remmy standing.
Like I said at the outset, give me a new world with texture? And I’m in heaven. And Settlers was perfect in that regard. A fantastic, if melancholic cinematic experience. I don’t know, what did you think about it?
Edited by: CY