It fills me with dread having to go over this movie and re-live this movie again. This is not a review but a warning to the fortunate people who have yet to see the movie Old and a place where the people who have, can feel comfort in the fact that someone on the internet agrees with them. In concept, the core plot of Old is intriguing, a beach that accelerates time and ages you at a much faster rate. It’s something that makes you say “that might be cool”, but then you’re hit with an immediate red flag with M. Night Shyamalan helming the movie. To say he is hit and miss would be an understatement. What Old actually is, is 1 hour and 20 minutes of stupid characters doing stupid things followed by the most underwhelming plot twist, if you can even call it that, of all time. According to the movie, on this beach you age 1 year every 30 minutes, and at a runtime of 1 hour 38 minutes, that’s how long it felt.
Let’s take it back to the beginning. A family of 4 goes on vacation to this seemingly beautiful resort. The morning following their arrival a concierge tells them about a private beach with beautiful rock walls, and deep blue water, that they can go to for the day. The family along with a handful of others are taken to this secluded beach and that’s where the entire movie takes place. Now, being a “sci-fi” movie, I go into it with a certain amount of rope when it comes to what’s believable and not, but this movie has so many plot holes that this would cause a person with trypophobia to have a panic attack. Now from here on out there will be spoilers, this has been your warning.
Plot Holes
The whole motive that this “hotel” has been tricking people into going to this beach, is so that they can rapidly test medicines that would normally take years to test. Every person that they bring to the beach has some sort of physicals or mental issue. That’s the plot twist, it’s just riveting stuff. (Not)
- The make-up or cause of the rapid aging on the beach is never explained except for a brief brush over with very little detail late in the movie.
- Whenever a character would try leaving the beach they would get extreme pressure in the head, blackout, and magically be back on the beach. They explain this by saying that because time moves differently on the beach once you cross the threshold into normality your body can’t handle it. This would mean that when they first arrived at the beach the time difference would most likely have killed them.
- Multiple people try to swim to safety and later wash up back on the beach dead. At the end of the movie the two children, now in their 50’s, swim through coral, just a bit off the shore, to safety. What did I miss, does this coral have some sort of magical property? Why did others die, but when you swim through the coral you live? I want answers M. Night Shyamalan.
- How did these people find out about this resort? Was it free? Wasn’t answered.
- Lastly, early in the movie one of the characters says that the hotel has their passports so no one will know they ever left for vacation. I guess they won’t notice when you don’t answer your phone, stop showing up for work and family outings, or don’t answer your door. Not to mention that almost every person that goes on vacation certainly tells at least 1 other person where their going. What tips this over the top is later in the movie it’s revealed that this is the 73rd trial. Your telling me that 72 other trials were conducted with nobody wondering where hundreds of people have disappeared to? It’s just absurdly stupid. My Brain hurts.
Now I can go on about how bad the acting is and that even the well accomplished actors and rising stars are all horrible, or how the script is abysmal and I’ve seen better of both in porn, but what really bothers me is how dumb the characters are. When they learn that the beach is rapidly ageing them, they make very little effort to actual find a way out. It’s like their lives don’t even matter. When they do try to be proactive it’s just terrible decision after terrible decision, but I guess it really doesn’t matter because NOTHING MAKES SENSE IN THIS MOVIE.
Conclusion
I’ve given it a lot of thought and came to the conclusion that the movie Old is the worst movie of the year. I know what you’re thinking and yes, even Space Jam A New Legacy is better than this. If you cut out all the unnecessary parts to this movie it could have been 20 minutes long. The characters are stupid because the way to survive is stupid and the fact that nothing makes sense nullifies all actions made throughout the movie. Time is precocious and you should treat it as so. We could all be here today and gone tomorrow so don’t waste your time watching this garbage.
Rating: Stay Youthful Like Paddington & Don’t Watch This
This review used our old rating system, The Paddington Scale. To learn more please read this post
Rongo 