Rest assured, all ye skeptics of M. Night's most recent film, Old, for you were right again... (suspense sound effect) it's bad.
Before I explain the core problem with this film, I am compelled to harp on one of my greatest filmmaking pet peeves: suspense sound effects. Some call it score, but I'm too pretentious to call such a blemish on the film industry anything but sound effects. Old is full of suspense sound effects, and not only do these uninspired sounds trample any chance of organic tension by loudly insisting that the viewer "be in suspense", they also usually lead up to a reveal that is anything but surprising. The level of predictability of this film, especially the first hour, is impressive. There's a point in Old where Mid-sized Sedan (trigger warning for victims of the Visit: he's a rapper) checks on a corpse the group recently discovered and is horrified by what he finds under the towel. Following a suspenseful sting and a big long suspense sound effect, it is revealed that... the corpse got older. Am I being punked? Is this a prank? If I'm correct, everything that should be surprising you in the first hour of this film are more or less revealed by the trailer, so who are these suspense sound effects for? Who is in suspense during these moments? Can I possibly be this jaded?
This film is yet another case of a simple concept, limitless in it's potential, explored with a tragic lack of imagination, only touching a handful of the fascinating concepts and conflicts that would naturally occur if a group of people found themselves rapidly aging and unable to escape. The only bold choice made was having two underage characters engage in unwitting intercourse and a rapid pregnancy. Every other choice is obvious, uninteresting, and/or totally unnecessary. Particularly unnecessary is the plot of the doctor, who's experiencing expeditious mental decay, apparently schizophrenia. I, ever the optimist, believed he had Alzheimers, and contrary to my expectations, this plight did not play out naturally, evoking fascinating existential questions along the way and immediately making the doctor the most interesting character, he just turns into a violent crazy people and stabs people. Why? Why in a story about people rapidly aging to death over the course of a day, do we need a murderer to drive the plot forward? People are dying NATURALLY, and it's the only interesting thing about the story! IT'S THE WHOLE POINT! Rather than exploring fascinating ideas, Old spends most of its fleeting time poorly explaining how the rapid aging works and why they can't escape (a phenomenon that cannot and should not be explained) and killing off characters one by one, like the horror movie it desperately wants to be, in painfully obvious ways.
Rather than being a grand rumination on the inevitable process of death, Old is much more interested in death itself, particularly suspenseful and thrilling deaths. In fact, the theme M. Night seems focussed on is the importance of "staying in the present", a theme he brushes shoulders with in the form of on-the-nose dialogue, but never makes a real point. Old makes no claims, despite being designed to, and the shoddy execution of the premise, poisoned by an awful script, is to blame. Speaking of which, the ending is about as basic as it gets. Our protagonists, the two children, escape, thanks to the boy's conveniently sudden revelation that a note he received in the first act contained a clue. They swim through coral (why not) and escape the "special minerals" that caused the rapid aging, then a cop we briefly met an hour ago gets the bad guys and they all fly away in a helicopter into the sunset. So, what's the point? Is the point really that we should live in the present more, or did I make that up? I don't see any other points being made, except that forcing people to undergo rapid aging for the world's most impatient scientists' research is bad? Sure, guess so. Thanks for aging me another hour and forty nine minutes, M. Night. You so effortlessly disappoint that the word is merely a formality at this point.
On an almost positive note, the cinematography is of note (the only thing of note, frankly). There are a lot of interesting, even memorable shots; personally, I love some of the extreme closeups that frame only a character's eye and 1/3 of their face, and I thought that the way the camera expressed degrading vision and hearing was clear and compelling. Although there are a lot of successful shots, the majority of them feel terribly unclear, as if unsure of their own purpose. Well, if the story doesn't want to give me an existential quandary, I'm glad that the camera team got one. There's a lot of unmotivated camera movement in Old, and I've seen lots of great unmotivated camerawork, but this isn't one of those movies. The unmotivated shots are consistently counterproductive in execution, frequently leaving the audience with nothing clear or important to look at, as if the the only note the director gave the camera operator was "go nuts". There are a lot of shots that are framed poorly on purpose, but the purpose is generally lost on me or overused to the extent that any and all meaning is lost. Every long arc or 360 pan is jarring and seemingly improvised; I never know what I'm supposed to be looking at, like I'm watching a bad take. I would best sum up Old's cinematography as deliberately yet erroneously confusing. I hope they had fun with all these unusual shots, because they aren't fun to watch. That's hard to admit for me, a man with unconditional love for bizarre camerawork.
The performances are an odd case, here: some of it is stellar, and some of it is surprisingly bad. Every third actor is stiff as a board, and it's always really astounding that they made it into such a big budget production. Most of my favorite characters are this way (namely Jarin and the cop), and it's really unfortunate. If I may drop one out of place detail before I wrap this up, the characters in Old age in chunks, in sudden time advancements, seemingly one at a time (the children suddenly age 5 years, then on of them ages another 5 while the other doesn't age at all, etc.) rather than everybody progressively and sinultaneously as the plot insists is the case. The absence of a smooth aging process in a film all about rapid aging is distracting. I imagine it's really difficult to account and maintain continuity for such a concept, but I wish they put more effort into it.
Old's disappointing story, combined with a mixture of phenomenal or awful acting, generic score, and occasionally successful cinematography equate to a bad experience for me. A lot of people will like it, though. This movie will be entertaining to the average person, but to any of you who have ever spent this long talking about why you didn't like a movie, this film will likely leave you feeling artistically starved.
1 out of 4 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
Tell Your Friends