Reviews by:
@ryan_the_nixon
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Old
2021
15
director: m Knight Shyamalan
starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Thomasin Mackenzie, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka Bird, Ken Leung, Eliza Scanlen, Aaron Pierre
Old is about a vacationing family who discovers a secluded beach, but when they are relaxing for a few hours, they are somehow ageing rapidly, reducing their entire lives to a single day. Yikes, Old was perhaps the biggest pile of crap I have ever seen. I genuinely think it’s the worst film I have ever seen.
Let’s be nice and start with the very few positives before my massive rant. The concept was very interesting, some of the cinematography was good. There were some hints of a strange and mysterious tone, with effective use of gore and a decent twist. The film had a very high and complex concept. It wasn’t executed well at all, but I commend M Knight for having a creative mind with this idea. Some of the cinematography was very nice, the set locations were beautiful and was a fun setting for this kind of film. The hints of a strange and mysterious tone were promising in parts. Within the first act of the film, Old did manage to partly interest me in the events that were taking place with very jarring changes to the characters and the plot and setting up a mystery well. The use of gore was effective. The cave scene with the broken bones was very grim and well executed, with realistic gore making the scene even more uncomfortable. And the twist at the end wasn’t good or bad, it just happened. I stopped caring but I put in the positive paragraph because I didn’t hate it.
Now for my big list of negatives. There was so much forced dialogue and unrealistic scenes. There wasn’t any form of set up and the one we did get was lazy. The cast had no chemistry, and there were too many rushed scenes. This film had perhaps the worst dialogue I have ever heard. It was clunky, generic and awkward and incredibly unrealistic. It made the characters come across as robots. Due to this there was countless unrealistic scenes. There were particular scenes with the younger children were they would talk about really adult things or something completely random and it wasn’t realistic behaviour at all. It made the scenes awkward and the pacing clunky. There was no form of set up, instead of establishing the characters we were just thrown straight into the film with no explanation, and then when we did get the set up for the beach it was extremely lazily written. With the characters coming across as dumb by just agreeing to go to a beach with no explanation or development of the plot. The cast also had absolutely no chemistry, I didn’t believe or connect with any of the relationships, mostly because they just weren’t acting like a family, and because pretty much all the characters were incredibly unlikeable and annoying. Finally, there were also way too many rushed scenes. Just as I thought the film would explain or develop a plot point to make you understand what was happening, they cut away quickly and never explained or went back to the scene. It made the pacing clunky and made the plot hard to follow and confusing.
My next few negatives would be the terrible camera work, bland pacing, lack of connection to characters. Odd character decisions and countless lapses in the logic. The camera work in this film was beyond poor. Even if done intentionally there was some terrible shots. Even a student film has better shots. There would be a scene and the film wouldn’t show you what was happening, instead it either had a weird, blurred lens or randomly had a close up of an ear or half a face. Really poor stuff. The pacing was also terrible, for such a high concept horror idea, I have never seen something executed in such a dull way. It was lifeless, dull and simply just boring. I also had absolutely no connection to the characters. Due to the issues that I have mentioned from previous paragraphs I just didn’t care about the characters. And because they were all dying off so quickly, I just didn’t care of feel any form of emotional connection to the characters whatsoever. And there was some painfully poor character decisions and lapses in the logic. There were just scenes of characters randomly running off and doing stupid things with no explanation to their actions whatsoever. Or they Would make a decision that obviously wouldn’t work and did it anyway, even though characters had died doing it. It was just filled with countless illogical decisions.
My final few negatives would be the script, the bad structure. The terrible performances, the lack of development or depth and the exposition. The script and the film’s structure was beyond poor. I didn’t view this as a film, it had no structure. It was a series of events with characters dying with no form of development or through line until the very end. It lacked any form of thought into structure and plot. I thought most of the performances were also terrible. Now to be fair this could have been to do with the script. But every performance was so bland and awkward. It was like the actors weren’t trying, and that they didn’t want to be there. Which is a shame because I have seen a lot of them do good performances before. There was absolutely no development or depth to any of the characters whatsoever, this was a big reason why I didn’t connect with any of them. The film made no effort to develop them because they killed them off to quickly, giving them one basic one dimensional trait or reason for conflict and then that’s it. Finally, the usage of exposition was painfully bad. When a film must spoon-feed and tell the audience practically every detail due to not being able to do it through the action, it really shows that the film was too complex to be written logically.
Overall, Old for me, is the worst film I have ever seen. It was embarrassing and poorly made. The script was poor. And I feel embarrassed for M Knight I think a student could have done a better job. I think I grew old watching this.
Overall rating 7/100
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