Day 5Reflections on: Old (2021)I hated this! I found myself yelling “WHAT?!” and&nb

Day 5

Reflections on:Old(2021)

• I hated this! I found myself yelling “WHAT?!” and “Fuck offffff!” repeatedly.
• This might have benefited from a subtitle after the main title. It could have been called “Old: The Beach that Makes People Old” like the movie Death Bed: The Bed that Eats(1977).Old was worse than Death Bed.
• The trailer reveals the twist that the beach makes you old. I watched this to learn what the secondary twist could possibly be. It is not worth it.
• I found the protagonist children to be insufferable from the opening scene onwards. The daughter sings a song (which was apparently written by Shyamalan’s daughter) that is notably bad. 
• It’s almost like The White Lotus but shitty. I kept wondering if it was supposed to be a comedy, but, alas, I don’t think it is. 
• Characters speak unlike any real humans ever have. Some examples of bizarre lines are: “I can’t wait to see what your voice sounds like when you’re older”, “We were supposed to come earlier but we rested in the room first”, and “my thoughts have more colours in them”. 
• An unnatural emphasis is put on character professions. Nobody in real life would say “I’m not a forensic pathologist, but -”.
• M.Night Shyamalan plays a character in this, like he does in many of his films. He comes off as arrogant in an unearned way. Almost like an elementary school student who recently learned what a metaphor is.
• This is a cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t use Tripadvisor. 
• The characters determine that the irregular passage of time only affects living cells. This is how M. Night deals with the question of why the characters’ hair and nails don’t grow rapidly. If this is true it makes no sense whatsoever why dead bodies decompose rapidly and turn into skeletons in mere hours! Why bother offering any internal logic if it isn’t consistently enforced!
• If time moves differently on the beach why does nobody get a sunburn?
  
• Characters continually slip away from one another in a way that feels like impossibly bad writing. 
• This is about as good or worse than Time Trap (2017). At least that movie was enjoyably bad. 
• Although time is passing too fast in the story, the film felt far too long at 108 minutes.
• It doesn’t look very good. Despite being shot on location it feels like everything was green screened. 
• It’s depressing to think about how many people risked their families’ lives to make this during a pandemic. For their sakes I wish this movie was better.
• The ending feels like the ending of Lost but worse. 
• I swore I’d never watch another M. Night Shyamalan movie before. I feel disrespected as a viewer after sitting through his films. Sorry!