Old! Lets Talk About It!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!

I hope you are having a wonderful day!

So lets talk about a new movie that came out this year, just judging it off the trailer it did not look like it was going to be a very good movie. But after watching it boy was I wrong! It was a little slow to start off and get into the more interesting parts of the movie but once it got there it did not stop blowing my mind! As the movie goes along it kind of clicks in your mind what is happening to the people on this beach but that ending.... I did not call the ending at all! It was a very good movie! It is a movie that once it gets into the best parts keeps you guessing as to what is going on and wondering if you can figure it out along with the characters.

It was written for the screen by M. Night Shyamalan and based on the graphic novel "Sandcastle" written by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. Released July of 2021.

I did not know that this movie was based off a book and after seeing the movie it is definitely one that I want to add to my bookshelf.

Now let me just say this before getting into what happened in the movie, if you haven't seen a movie written/directed by M. Night Shyamalan I highly recommend his movies. In particular I recommend Split and The Happening because they also have crazy story lines and very dramatic endings.

But anyways lets get into this movie.

********SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!********

(I will not include all of the details of the movie but will provide a brief summary so there is still some sort of surprise to some of the events that happen in the movie if you decide to go watch it. )

So a family goes on a vacation to a very fancy resort. We find out that the mother has a terminal disease and they have not told their children yet. The parents plan on having one last family vacation before telling the kids what is going on. While on this getaway they meet the hotel event planners son who likes to leave puzzle messages for the oldest son of this family. The first day of being there, the hotel event planner tells them about this secluded beach that they will drive them close to and then the rest of the way they have to walk. The beach was absolutely beautiful. There were also a few other groups of people there but everything seemed to be pretty normal about this beach. But things started to get a little weird when a man who was on the beach earlier that day with a women, who has yet to be seen, and he is just sitting alone away from everyone else on the beach. One of the kids from the main family goes off on his own to this little side watering hole and all of a sudden the woman's body shows up floating in the water, and she is dead. No explanation as to what happened to her and everyone looks to the man to figure out what had happened to the woman, but he had no idea either. This is when the movie takes a turn and everything just spirals from here. The kids age rapidly, the oldest lady in the group of people on the beach dies, the adults try to find a way off of the beach pass out in every attempt to leave and end up back at the beach.

At this point each group of people join together to try and figure out what is going on with them on this beach. At first they think that the man who was on the beach before them had killed the woman and knew what was going on but he was just as clueless as they were. The once beautiful, relaxing getaway beach is now a terrifying place that they cannot escape.

As the movie goes on they figure out that everyone on the beach has some sort of terminal illness, they also found out that time is manipulated on this beach, accelerating the aging process where every hour is years off of their lives. Meaning their aging process, terminal illness time frames, and even healing processes are accelerated tremendously. The adults try to figure out a way of getting off the island, they try climbing up the cliffs, swimming out into the ocean, and going back the way that they got there but all attempts left them fainting and passing out and ending back up on the beach again. By the middle of the movie every character has pretty much come to the conclusion that they are not getting off of this island alive. By the morning, the only people who are still left alive after aging 50 years are the two children from the family at the beginning of the movie. They are sitting on the beach talking and playing in the sand and the son remembers that he still had a cryptic message from the hotel event planners son that he hadn't read yet. He goes and gets it and the message says "my uncle hates the coral". The two siblings see the coral with in swimming distance from the beach, swim out to it and are able to escape the beach without passing out.

The siblings are able to return to the hotel, get the police involved and expose the resort for its true intentions. They invite people with terminal illnesses to their resort in an attempt to test out new medicines for each disease that the guests have. They send the people who have the experimental drugs to the beach to speed up the process and see if the drug works. It does not seem that there are ever any survivors of the beach. The hotel uses the guests as test subjects that takes a day of researching instead of years. The guests proof of ever being there is removed and they also hack the families computers to clear the search, contact, and purchase of the vacation from that resort and everything is erased. So it just looks like the people just went mysteriously missing and were never found.

I know I left out a lot of details in this post but I did not want to ruin the best parts of the movie because some of the scenes are pretty gruesome and I do not want to spoil some of the scenes in this movie. If you do end up watching this movie there is one scene that I did not spoil and I want to know your reactions to it. When watching it with a room full of people no one could look at the screen when this scene was happening and it was probably the most traumatizing thing in the entire movie. This movie wasn't particularly interesting to me when seeing the trailers for it, because it just looked like one of your typical psychological thrillers that has predicable outcomes. But like they always say, don't judge a book by its cover.

To start the conversation up, I will ask you a question that went through my mind after the movie ended. Yes, the hotel was wrong in hiding the fact that the guests were going to die due to the experimentation going on at the beach. But do you think that the hotel was in the wrong with their initial thoughts of using the beach to expand findings on medical cures to terminal illness?

Their research took a day instead of years of research to come up with a medicine that helps people with the diseases. Research that companies have paid millions of dollars and spent years of research to come up with medicines that can help people have better quality of life while living with these diseases that this resort had taken a day to find an actual cure. They somehow figured out that the beach manipulates time and took advantage of this discovery to try and help find medicine that helped out people with terminal illnesses. Yes they could have gone about it in the more conventional way and set it up as a research facility and had people sign up for the experiments. But then they going to have to pay these people while also trying to fund their labs so I can see where they got the idea of hiding what they were doing. I am in no way saying that what they did was right in any way shape or form, I just get why they did it the way that they did it. They were having people pay them to stay at a fancy resort, not all the guests were meant to be test subjects, so they were able to fund their research and hold a credible business to where if someone ever did find out that the missing people went to their resort, no one would ask questions.

Is the resort really in the wrong? Even though they were lying to their guests about their true intentions, they were still doing amazing work in medical research.

Let me know what you think in the comments below and lets start talking about it!

I will end this post with a quote from the movie that I hope you enjoy. I like it particularly just because it is a pretty relatable question.

"I wonder if everybody continues to feel like a kid when they are our age, or is it because we were kids yesterday?"