*. I wonder if M. Night Shyamalan likes making these kinds of gimmick films, or if it’s just something he fell into and now is stuck with. I actually think he likes making them. Otherwise he would have probably moved on.
*. The main idea here, of a beach where the visitors begin to age at a supernatural pace (two years an hour), came from a French graphic novel, but Shyamalan added his own twist. I think it’s a good premise, and the twist at least has its own sort of logic. Indeed, it’s not really a surprise at all. But the basic problem with all such twists is that they breed an impatience in the audience. You just want to find out what’s going on, and you don’t care so much about what’s happening at the moment, which all feels contrived anyway.
*. A film like this also not only dares you but begs you to question how well its bizarre premise holds together. I’m afraid it doesn’t. I was bothered by a lot of what was going on. Why do the kids seems to grow old so much faster than the adults, and how do they develop such intelligence and emotional maturity to go along with their physical growth? How do the people end up back out on the beach after suffering some kind of pressure sickness when they try to leave? Why do the dead bodies decompose so quickly? None of this made sense to me, along with much else I won’t get into.
*. Is it watchable? Yes. Shyamalan seems to have really been taken with panning the camera in this film, and he works the beach well as a location. We go through all the fairly predictable, and one not-so-predictable, crises and failed escapes. But the characters are nothing but the usual stereotypes (the accountant who won’t let up talking about the odds, the trophy wife who turns into a monster) and the story just sort of limps along. I wrote in my notes that it felt like a Twilight Zone episode put on the rack, and found out later that Shyamalan himself called it a “two-hour Twilight Zone episode.” So that’s exactly where you are.
*. Any thought of deeper connections is just wishful thinking. Shyamalan says he wanted to invoke the spirit of movies that developed a sense of natural supernaturalism like Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock, but there’s none of that. Nor is there any of the moral or political edge of The Exterminating Angel, which is another comparison that’s been made.
*. Instead, what with the (very) young lovers getting at it the movie that strangely crept to mind was The Blue Lagoon (1980). This made me wonder how many people today even remember The Blue Lagoon, which was quite the succès de scandale at the time. It seems to be one of those movies that has pretty much dropped off everyone’s radar today. It’s interesting how that happens.
*. Will Old fare any better, or will it disappear into the sands of time like the bodies on its beach? I suspect it will be remembered as a minor novelty, which is all that I think it tries to be. A bit disappointing given the potential it had to go in different and more interesting directions, but from this particular genre of beach movie there really is no exit.
Alex on Film 
Perhaps the most curious thing about the warping of the space-time continuum in this film is the way it actually premiered in Scotland a full *nine years* before its debut in the rest of the world!
Why are you commenting to yourself?
More of a footnote than a comment. Plus it’s a joke.
ah right,I presume at Dix’s expense?
Yep!
It’s always at my expense. Alex habitually steals any half-decent observations on films from reading my reviews. Some guys have all the luck!
Some guys have all the pain!
Well, I see you got it!
Some guys do nothing but complain!
I haven’t seen this one and didn’t really have the desire to. I remember the Blue Lagoon and the cafuffle about Brook Shields being too young to get her tits oot. Didn’t think too much of the movie, and dying of berries was a bit poor when they could at least have been eaten by th cannibals. Oh well.
I should go back and have a look at the Blue Lagoon but I doubt the library has it in.
Oh save yourself, watch something worthy, or at least funny.
Charlie Chan and the Dragon Queen is next up, I think.
Next up is some time off! Going to take a bit of a break.
Old is like a Twilight Zone episode that you’d be better off skipping. Sixth form stuff.
If this is all he wants to do then he should probably stick to lower-budget quickies. There’s no point in dressing this material up too much because it starts to trip over itself with all the stuff that’s not really necessary to make it work.
I stopped watching Shyamalan’s stuff awhile ago. I don’t know if he started putting out worse movies or if I started expecting more (which seems impossible, considering what we get now, sigh), but he just isn’t the magnet he used to be for me.
I remember Dix writing up his review and thinking “Nope, still not interested in Shyamalan” and your review has made me really double down on that. Which is too bad because I really liked 6th Sense and The Village…
For some reason he gave up on what he did really well, which is make good suspense movies. This movie doesn’t work on that level at all.