I think I watched a rather different movie but the fun part is I can see the movie you saw as well. For me I think one of the big things that I eventually settled on was letting my distrust that it wasn’t a time travel movie lead. It’s very easy to read it as a 12 Monkeys version of Terminator where Sam Rockwell is destined to be a dull pawn in the AI bootstrap (over and over across many a loop of timelines). Somewhere about mid-movie I settled on it had to be an eXistenZ more than a 12 Monkeys.

I came away feeling certain it wasn’t a time travel loop but a videogame loop and that the movie was operating almost entirely on videogame logic. Giant boss battle because we’ve reached the part of the map with a giant boss battle, pretty much directly.

Even the framework provided inside the movie that one of the few reliable tips that you are stuck in one of the VR realities is the catch phrase (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) and the movie ending with it shouting that at you and also a song composed by the director and his brother with those lyrics.

From that perspective the logic that the ending of “I’ll solve it with an anti-technology plague” doesn’t have to make sense, it’s just the next videogame level to keep Sam Rockwell’s character distracted. (It doesn’t make any sense outside of the videogame logic that now there needs to be a new plan because the old one failed. If that allergy was blood transmittable then any kid of Ingrid’s would be born with it and not that tempted by a random headset in the woods.)

The twist is given at the end of the main “loop” that everyone is inside a VR simulation by that point. How does the time travel even work if the last half of it is inside the game? Lots of weird bootstrap questions there. My reading is the whole thing is inside the game from the very beginning and time travel the sort of game narrative that best fit Sam Rockwell’s (stupidly unnamed) character.

Also I thought there was a lot of low key Amazon+Meta mockery in the background worldbuilding. The same company is involved in the making/use of drones, shipping, random retail, VR headsets, human cloning, social media, and more. Sam’s character textually describes as “the AI is building itself” but I read it subtextually more as the “corporations are the original evil ‘artificial intelligence’ that don’t think or work like humans do” sort of anti-capitalist message. Leave it to evil companies to find ways to profit off the grief of too regular school shootings by getting the government to pay for expensive technology. Leave it to evil VR companies to think the world’s population is better off trapped in games that they build than actual reality. Leave it to a company that thinks drones and surveillance fit the same family friendly/safe facade as social media and cheap shipping of goods. Do we know any real companies acting like that?

I don’t know if my reading is “more accurate” to the movie. Like both 12 Monkeys and eXistenZ it seems trying to leave a dark sense of ambiguity no matter what was going on. But as a reading it did leave me wanting to watch the movie again. (It also had me wanting to watch Gentleman Broncos again, which I’ve been joking about since the Minecraft Movie was intentionally made a part of the “Napoleon Dynamite Cinematic Universe”.)