Old - Movie Review
January 21, 2024•399 words
How Much I recommend it: 3/10
Life is too short to watch bad movies.
The idea behind Old is interesting but this movie was very poorly made and I skipped forward through over half of it.
The premise is that a family of four arrives for a vacation at a luxury resort on an unnamed tropical island, probably in the Caribbean.
The owner of the resort they are staying at arranges to have them taken to a secret beach that no one else can access. They go, along with some other guests, and get dropped off at the mouth of a canyon that leads into the beach.
Once on the beach, weird things start happening starting with the body of a dead woman washing onto the shore. Then, the elderly mother of one of the guests dies. The two kids who were about 8 and 10 on arrival are aging rapidly, going through their teens and into their twenties in a matter of a few hours.
The party realizes that they are aging at a rate of about 1 year every thirty minutes. One by one they start dying in various ways.
The last two survivors find a clue that allows them to escape the beach.
Back at the resort, we find out that the whole thing is an experiment. That they take people with pre existing medical conditions, give them experimental medications when they arrive at the resort, then take them to the beach to see how the drug affects them over the course of years.
The twist at the end is what made the whole thing interesting and not a 1/10 in my view. But, I didn’t like the film for several reasons.
One, it’s way too long. It’s an almost two hour movie. The moment I realized how slow it was, I skipped forward a full 25 minutes and missed nothing in the plot. I skipped ahead another 3 or 4 times and still missed nothing. This would have been better as a 20 minute short film.
Two, the dialogue and acting is unnatural.
Three, it’s poorly made. The aged characters don’t look that much older even when they’re supposed to be 30+ years older than when they arrived.
So that’s it, I won’t waste anymore time reflecting on this one. I think this would probably be an amazing book but I cannot recommend the movie.