Like I said on Facebook, your point about the past being another planet is totally key, with this film. In the supplements on the BluRay, Reece Shearsmith and Michael Smiley talk about how incredibly hard they found the dialogue, mainly because sometimes they were too unsure of what they were actually saying to be able to paraphrase if they forgot a specific line. Yet from my POV, they all manage to make this hermetically archaic language sound grounded, biological. It reminded me also of Nigel Kneale's The Road, where you keep going: "Oh man, SO close!" whenever someone makes a "scientific" point that still verges on some effed-up combo of alchemy and animism.