MovieChat Forums > Old (2021) Discussion > Odd things I noticed

Odd things I noticed


Just some oddities I noticed, probably some explanations out there if you have them I'd love to hear it:

- They never show them eating despite all that food that was given to them by the van driver. If they were in that state where time was accelerated, they would be constantly hungry and have to sit down and eat, not to mention go to the washroom every few minutes. Just like the baby being born and almost immediately dying due to lack of attention and nutrition, for some reason no one else has to eat. Pregnant girl eats like crazy for a little bit, but that's pretty much it.

- As the kids age, they would retain their very short child life experience and would not have gained teenager, adult, or senior life experience--they would still have the life experience as children as they aged. As a result, they would not have sex with each other, they'd be still way too young to understand how it works in the time frame provided in the movie, and most certainly would not engage in hanky panky in the tent based on their childhood knowledge in such a short period of time. I can see it happening perhaps later in the film, but not that early on. I know this was injected into the film for shock value and sensationalism.

- As the girl aged and seemingly didn't notice her chest area expanding and her bikini getting smaller and smaller, I found that bizarre. The first thing that girl would have done is look down and realized quickly something was very wrong as the chest got very tight in the swimsuit.

- I won't even get into the PMS situation that would have affected every teen girl/woman on that beach at a highly accelerated level.

- Guy and Prisca seemingly aged the least out of everyone. Their hair color doesn't even turn silver or gray like it should for the longest time.

- Why did the beautiful Abbey Lee bikini woman age so much faster than Guy and Prisca? She wanders into that cave, hunchback and all, chasing the kids as a skinny old hag flaying her limbs about, wrecking them on the rocks, breaking her bones, all the while going crazy and not giving a care in the world, and then just dies suddenly, meanwhile looking like an alien or something.

- So the two remaining kids finally make it off the beach, and are in the middle of the water surrounded by: more rocks and very little shore. The movie should probably have showed them getting to the shore, and then taking that long walk back to the resort.

- The camera angles were really bad in the film, many times over. Sometimes that was done deliberately for shock value purposes, but most of the time it was just annoying.

4/10, pretty good first half, however it had a really poor second half.

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-The implication is that they are eating like crazy. They just don't show us. Kinda like how we assume that ppl in other movies go to the rest room, but movies don't show us that all the time.

-Sexual intercourse was not injected into the film for shock value and sensationalism. In fact that was one of the few things taken directly from the source graphic novel. And in terms of understanding sex...I mean, this was kind of the plot of blue lagoon. I guess we can't really say for certain either way of two kids in isolation in the 6-9 age group, will figure out sex, if left to their own devices.

-If the expansion is gradual, you may not notice until it's uncomfortable. It's like a sound, gradually getting louder and louder. You won't register a change if the changes are minute.

-There is no explanation about PMS.

-Everyone aged inconsistently. This is just a movie. This isn't really an oddity.

-Abbey Lee did not age so much faster than the others. Not sure what the flailing around has anything to do with that either. She was breaking her bones.

-They didn't show this part just like they didn't show ppl eat, or show people taking a shit.

-Some of the camera angles are bad, but based on your comment, I think you just didn't like the stylistic choice. They're different and not your usual shots, but not objectively poor. And yes, intentionally keeping things out of sight from the viewer at times. It's not "shock value".

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The implication is definitely not that they are eating like crazy. You just seem hell bent on defending the movie if you're claiming that. The pregnant girl starts eating which I'm sure is meant to imply her pregnancy before it's shown, but Trent specifically says he's not hungry. He's somehow not hungry even though days are passing as they are having that conversation and his body is changing and growing. If you want to say "it's just a movie," fair enough, but don't compare a glaring plot hole to characters using the bathroom off screen in other movies.

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The implication is definitely not that they are eating like crazy.


The movie explicitly establishes at the beginning that they have an exorbitant amount of food for that many people for one day, so yeah, I think we can assume that the food is being eaten, otherwise that detail of having too much food is irrelevant.

If you want to dismiss the mention of food excess as incidental, and their lack of need for calories a plot hole, instead of combining those two instances together...then maybe you're the one hellbent on looking for something wrong with the movie.

There are things wrong with the movie, but I'm gonna call out the complaints that are just ignorantly superficial.

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There's an early scene where Abbey Lee's selfie girl character is ordering a calcium rich drink and explains to the waiter she has a calcium deficiency. During her accelerated ageing her bones become brittle and deformed due to lack of calcium. Her arm breaks when she lifts a heavy rock in the cave, and it immediately heals in the broken position. Then as she's flailing around in pain the same thing happens to her other bones. She probably dies from a broken neck.

Of course all the other characters, particularly the children, should be suffering from calcium deficiency, too, since they're not eating anywhere near enough to support the growth that they're experiencing.

I enjoyed the movie, though the logic of it doesn't bear close examination.

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Ahh okay, I had missed that part about selfie girl's calcium deficiency. That indeed makes a lot more sense now.

I wonder, did that mean Kara climbing the rock wall also suffered something similar before she fell down from the top or was that just because she hit the edge of the time anomaly and immediately died?

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I think she blacked out, like others who tried to leave the beach had done. She died from the fall.

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Correct. Everyone blacks out at the perimeter, except for the path through the coral.

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Yeah the first thing that came to my mind was the kids growing but somehow their clothes grew as well. Thomasin McKenzie's bikini fit her quite perfectly :-)

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It was explained in the film that older Maddox is wearing her mom's extra bikini.

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Ok someone already mentioned the calcium thing.

As far as people eating, it does talk about how the kids would get hungry often as their bodies are physically getting larger but with the adults, only their cells were aging. And the kids said multiple times through the movie they were hungry, it just didn’t show them actually eating.
And the driver knew they would need all that food, the one guy said it would be a waste, but the driver insisted the kids would need it.

As far as sex, I think most humans are curious and once the hormones kick in (which they must have to develop hair growth and stuff), it started that drive.

I felt the doctor didn’t age as quickly either. I kept thinking that throughout.

I also would have liked to see what happened after the coral also. They swam there, but then what? How did they make it back to the resort.

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They could have aged the doctor by simply replacing Rufus Sewell with Ian McShane somewhere near the end. The two actors look remarkably similar, but 25 years apart.

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You also need to remember that the people were on experimental medications. Some of those medicines may have been designed to slow the aging process. Maybe some of the food was spiked with something that altered aging as well. It's all technically in line with the things you have to believe are possible based on the "facts" provided by the movie.

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Very true! I wasn’t as aware of the medications as I should have been, that was definitely a factor in the time anomaly.

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Funny how you rate the movie a 4/10 yet you seemed to miss everything or not understand a lot of what was going on. Kinda makes your rating meaningless. Stick to Transformers maybe, or movies that require less thinking.

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"Stick to Transformers maybe, or movies that require less thinking."

You didn't get the memo? No one has said this in about four years. Talk about Old!

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"The camera angles were really bad in the film, many times over. Sometimes that was done deliberately for shock value purposes, but most of the time it was just annoying."

This. ^
What was that all about?
I know that he was trying to hide the faces of the children for the big reveal, but at other times there seemed to be no purpose for it. It was like a badly filmed home movie.

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What do you mean?

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It is just M. Night Shamalamalama's filming style.

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How much time did you expect thinking of the bikini girl?

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Time was not flowing faster. Only their cells were regenerating (and consequently dying) faster.

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