OLD (2021) / M. Night Shyamalan by 6ixStringJack

CINEMA

OLD (2021) / M. Night Shyamalan

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Monday, July 29, 2024 02:04
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VIEWED: 224
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Monday, July 29, 2024 2:04 AM

Holy shit. That was great.

I haven't seen all of Shyamalan's movies, but of the ones I've seen, this was by far the best. Nothing else even comes close.

46% Top Critics (50% All Critics) and 53% Verified Audience (43% All Audience)?

Why am I not surprised?

SPOILERS AHEAD

I understand the Critics hating on it because Big Pharma did not approve, especially with what we were all right in the middle of going through together at the time of release, July 23rd, 2021. I can only imagine the day that Dr. Fauci got to view an early screening of it and said "uuuuuuuuuuuh.... no. We're not going to let this one be taken seriously by anybody... especially right now". And all the good little boys and girls at MSNBC and The New York Times and Fox News and all of the other Billionaire owned "news" agencies got right to work burying it. And at this point in Shyamalan's spotty career, I don't think they even had to work any overtime to get that job done. It's been en vogue to shit all over the guy for the last decade and a half or so.

I'm just going to chalk the audience hate up to stupid people manipulating stupid people on the internet. And until tonight, at least on the topic of this movie, I count myself among everyone in the latter group.

Fuck The Sixth Sense... That movie was normie trash.

In all likelihood, this WAS Shyamalan's Magnum Opus. And now I have every intention to watch everything else he's ever done just to confirm that this is the truth.

Anyone who hasn't seen "Old" needs to see it, and anyone who has seen it before needs to watch it again.

Just reading that blurb on IMDB after JSF mentioned it as a movie that Thomasin McKenzie starred in after my high praise for her in JoJo Rabbit, memories of YT videos reviewing "Old" came flooding back. So instead of going blind into this movie, which I vastly prefer to do over knowing so much about the plot, I was very well aware of the main premise of the flick before I hit play. I can only thank the people doing those reviews at the time that nobody spoiled the ending for me.

It takes a little while for the setting and the main players to be established, but once things start going south it is non-stop tragedy after tragedy being thrown in your face without any room to breathe in between them.

Experiencing this movie is the antithesis of boredom.

And the whole time I felt myself wondering how the hell is this going to end? What kind of hokey plot twist did he put in this one that made everybody hate it so much?

And then, just like that, the completely unexpected happened...

The ending was great.

Of a group of around a dozen people tricked into spending the day on this "private beach" everyone but the 6 year old boy and 11 year old girl was dead. Only now they were 50 and 55 years old, so it's really hard to call them "winners" or claim that this had a happy ending.

But the bad guys, and oh were they all truly BAD GUYS... well, they all got what they fucking deserved.

Cult members, every last one of them. Worshiping at the altar of Commercialized Science, all the while believing that they were the good guys and that what they were doing was for the good of the human race. Little worms in white lab coats serving their masters at BlackRock and Vanguard well, while no doubt reaping the rewards of lifetime free medical care for them and their families, ungodly bonuses when things go right, and profit sharing in their 401k accounts that us normies could only ever dream about.

Not one of them would have lost a single night's sleep over murdering every single person in this group, just as they did not lose any sleep when they murdered every single person in the 72 cohorts of people they sent in before them to die in the name of Science, when all they were really doing is bolstering the bottom line and stock price of the fictional Warren & Warren pharmaceutical company.

Given the opportunity, they would have all gladly continued doing this for the rest of their rich and happy lives. And I'm sure if one of them ever grew a soul and tried to stop it from happening anymore, they were thrown right in the pit with all the innocent people that they were murdering. Though that was not a plot point in this movie and would have leaked the ending far before you needed to know what was going on, I imagine that there were at least a few ex-employees that met their demise on that island as well. But those would have been honorable deaths by people who managed to redeem themselves the very day before they met their maker.

And yanno what? In a world where medical care was affordable and people didn't ultimately die while handing over every single dime they ever made in their lives just to live another day and leaving nothing behind for their children in the process.... In THAT world I might have a bit of sympathy for the bad guys here and some understanding that what they were doing was truly for the greater good. But when Diabetes treatment is beyond decades old in 2024 and they still have the fucking gall to charge you $1,200 a month for treatment at your local pharmacy just to live another day? Well... they can all go right ahead and fuck themselves to death.

Yeah... Sure... The premise of "Old" is based off of pseudoscience nonsense, with some magical magnetic fields that age people around 2 years every hour that they are exposed to it. I'll grant you that.

And yeah... the fact that the area somehow magically made them pass out and show up again on the beach shortly after they tried to make an escape with no explanation how they got back there could be considered a pretty big plot hole.

But that's all beside the point, and if that's the stuff people were focused on when they gave "Old" a shitty rating, the entire meaning of the movie went way over all of their heads, and the last 90 minutes of their lives were completely wasted. If you haven't been paying attention to the review so far, everything leading up to the last 7 minutes of the movie that mattered was just suspense that was setting the stage for the message.

The point was, that IF this were at all possible in our universe, there is no shortage of "people" in our world what would waste no time doing the exact same thing we just watched these fictional monsters do to innocent people in this movie. But unlike the end of this movie, they'd get away with it forever, because in real life the Bad Guys.... The REAL BAD GUYS... Well... They always win.

Even though they were all fictional players on display, it just felt so good watching their hubris fuck them all sideways in the end. And I thank Mr. Shyamalan for leaving me right now in this moment with an exquisite sense of schadenfreude that could only come from watching the beginnings of an evil empire crashing down all around the demons. Even if it was all just make believe.

Don't buy the anti-hype. Watch this movie. You'll thank me later. 9/10.

Thanks for mentioning it yesterday, JSF.

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