A group of travelers arrive at a certain resort with the intention of having a happy vacation. This is the background of the movie “Old, 2021” (Old, 2021).
Are they really all having fun? Not really. For example, a couple was planning to get divorced, but for the sake of a couple of children, they are not ready to disclose this for the time being. There is another episode, one that is important to the subsequent plot: the siblings form a friendship with a local boy. The two boys devise a set of codes and plan to play a game of “encrypted passwords”.
The next day, on the strong recommendation of the local guide, the group arrives at a beautiful beach, including the estranged couple and the two children. The story unfolds slowly.
The beach was beautiful, but things gradually changed. First, the children became easily hungry, and then the body of a drowning man appeared. It was a little strange, but still within their acceptable range, until the body decomposed in less than three hours under completely impossible circumstances, which drew the attention of the play as well as the audience.
Earlier there was also a shot of three children (in addition to the pair of siblings, and a little girl) playing with only sound, and the camera never showed a proper face, at which point the audience must have realized that something was wrong, but could not guess the real reason anyway. Then a new couple asked the age of the siblings, the sister said the brother was only 6 years old, but the couple decided that the brother looked 10 years old. That’s when the siblings’ parents appeared and instantly fixed upon seeing their children –
The siblings had grown up quickly in just one hour!
At this point, both the people in the play and the audience, I’m afraid they have realized: for some unknown reason, here will let time accelerate. It is not yet obvious to the adults, but the children grow up and mature rapidly – and that is why they become easily hungry.
People want to leave, but ultimately it is difficult to make the trip. Leaving along the way they came, they would encounter an invisible wall that bounced people back to the beach; someone tried to swim across the sea to get help, but their bodies were washed back to the beach; someone tried to climb along the cliff to the rocks that surround the beach and was likewise dropped dead …… In short, this is a space where there is no return.
After that, a lot of things happened: the brother and the peer and has grown up with the girl to become attached, the girl pregnant and give birth (the so-called October pregnancy, but only in a flash), the result of the baby difficult to adapt to such a rapid change in time and died; someone in an abnormal state into a state of insanity; someone’s body underwent strange changes …… In short, the These tourists died one by one. The next morning, the beach is left only the siblings who have entered the middle and old age. And they found that someone was filming here in the distance.
The siblings thought that if there was some kind of metal channel, it was possible to shield the time anomaly here, but they struggled to find any metal substance. At this point, the boy accidentally remembered the coded note in his pocket, and translated it as “uncle does not like coral”. He suddenly understood: coral must be like metal can block this anomaly effect. So, the siblings tried to swim through the underwater coral reef channel, but unexpectedly the sister’s clothes hooked on top of the coral ……
Good, this beach does exist time anomaly. But what was originally a mysterious natural phenomenon has been injected with a man-made evil element: it has become a drug experimentation site – no wonder someone is secretly filming.
According to the villain, we won’t have to spend our lives experimenting with drugs in the future. Because this beach has condensed time, just in time to experiment with new drugs. For example, one of the tourists suffering from epilepsy, after taking the new drug developed by the company (without my knowledge, of course), actually 16 years without a seizure, indicating that the drug is effective – of course, the so-called 16 years is “physiological time”, in fact, still happened in within a day.
The day after the bodies of the tourists were dropped off, the local guide was recommending the beach to new tourists. That’s when the siblings showed up – and they made it across the reef alive.
Thus, the conspiracy was uncovered, the truth was revealed, and the guilty villains were duly punished. But what about the youth of the two children? What about the lives of the tourists? From whom should we recover?
If you only read the above story, you will feel that this is a very good movie. There are many science fiction movies about time, but very few of them elaborate from this perspective. This is a very clever idea. However, as a film, “Aging” is clearly not successful enough. It is one of those “high concept, bad plot” films, where a good idea is spoiled by the narrative itself. In short, the audience may only appreciate the idea, but not be able to resonate with the plot.