And that's actually where I'll start with my positives of the film. The concept is actually really interesting and engaging. All the way through the film I was always engaged with the story and never felt bored.
Next I really liked the location setting. Whilst set almost entirely during the day, it's nice for a film to feel atmospherically eerie without having to go dark or have dark settings. The beach was also very creepy at times and like Jaws made people afraid to go in the water, Old has the potential to make people feel afraid of the beach.
I also admire M Night Shyamalan respect for the audience. There's times where something is happening to people and instead of the characters addressing what is happening, it feels like he wants the audience to work out what is happening and for my experience, I found it easy to work out what was happening to the characters. I always like it when films don't overexplain current events. Now soon I'll have something that will compromise that but on this section, I truly admired it.
Unfortunately this film couldn't stick the landing to its premise so we need to move onto the negatives and I'll be honest, I had a lot of issues with this film. Now I'm going to start small and work my way to the big issues.
So first, the camerawork was really distracting because there's multiple times where a scene is framed but some characters are cropped out and whilst that may not sound particularly bad, when you watch it, it feels like a really odd choice. There's one scene where characters are grouped together but the camera is sinking into the water and the group become out of focus or another scene where the group are in a circle and the camera starts turning but it's so fast, the scene becomes blurry and characters talk out of focus. At one point, I started questioning if the cameraman was drunk or something because it began to really annoy me.
Whilst staying onto the technical aspects, the editing is also very frustrating because scenes are cut out at annoying moments. For example, one character is killed off but when they die, the scene cuts their death scene and we don't even get to see their body. Considering this is from the director of the sixth sense that features multiple scary and gory scenes, it confuses me why this decision was even made.
Now I am a big defender of actors because I know how hard it is but there was some really bad acting from several actors. Some were good but others were very bad, especially when it came to their line delivery like the actors didn't really know what they were saying and just went with it.
But the biggest problem with the film is the resolution of the concept. All the negatives I have up above, I could overlook if this film had a way of ending things on a positive note and help me buy the answers that are given to me to the concept and once this film starts giving answers, that is when it started to fall apart for me.
That is when I started noticing multiple plot holes and had more questions than answers towards the end. It starts to get really convoluted to where I couldn't even summarise the answers given to me in a simple sentence. I feel like I need someone to explain to the ending to me in case I missed something.
But my final issue is whilst this is an interesting concept and is the films strongest value, it also becomes the films major flaw as it can't stick to its own rules and at one point, cheats its own story to create new plotlines. This really feels like M Night Shyamalan created the concept, started filming but didn't have a plan for the rest of the film so made everything up as he went along.
So overall, whilst I would say this is not the worst film of the year and is certainly worth a least one watch to experience it, this is probably the most flawed film of the year and it's a real shame. I really wanted to be more positive.
⭐⭐
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