When Did Maddox Stop Being Funny
[Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Old.]
In M. Night Shyamalan's Old , there are three intersecting mysteries. The first mystery is why is a specific beach is causing people who inhabit it to age at a highly accelerated rate. The second mystery is why do people blackout and end up back on the beach whenever they try to leave. The third mystery is why were these people specifically brought to this beach in the first place.
To the film's credit, the first two questions are answered over the course of the story. The reason that the characters are aging rapidly is that there's something on this particular beach that causes cells to age at an accelerated rate. It doesn't affect hair or fingernails because those are "dead cells", but it can cause cuts to heal over and scar instantaneously or bones to gruesomely mend in a matter of seconds. The reason for the blackouts has something to do with magnetism essentially causing an intense pressure similar to how someone who tried to reacclimate too quickly would pass out.
The answer to the third mystery comes at the end. As the adult versions of Trent (Emun Elliott) and Maddox (Embeth Davidtz) realize that the coral might provide a shielding from the magnetism causing the blackouts, they decide to swim for it, but are presumed drowned by an employee of the hotel (Shyamalan), who has been watching the events from afar. He reports back that all subjects of Trial 73 have perished, and returns to base.
It turns out that the resort, Anamika, is a front for a pharmaceutical company called Warren & Warren. They get patient information when people go to pick up their prescriptions, then they offer people a great rate for an alluring tropical getaway. When the people arrive, they are unknowingly fed a new drug. The following day, they are then taken to the beach where aging is accelerated. The purpose for all of this is that it allows Warren & Warren to basically speed through clinical trials. They note that an anti-seizure medication they gave to Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) worked for eight hours, which was the equivalent of sixteen years. Thus, our characters are basically lab rats for Warren & Warren. Their existence can be erased (this part in particular seems silly because if entire families kept disappearing every time they went to this resort, it would probably raise a red flag or two), and Warren & Warren goes on testing out different drugs on different ailments on the time beach.
However, Trent and Maddox managed to get off the beach and back to the resort, and they brought with them a journal of a previous victim who recorded the names of other people, which backs up Trent and Maddox's story. They hand the journal to a cop who's staying at the resort, he discovers it has names of missing persons, and the people at the resort are quickly arrested. Trent and Maddox get to fly home where they'll be united with their aunt, who will likely be surprised to find that her nephew and niece are now full-grown adults. The end.
It's not a particularly satisfying resolution simply because the film doesn't really need it. For his part, Shyamalan told us that he always had this ending in mind because while the source material, the graphic novel Sandcastle , doesn't include these events, he believes they were implied so he chose to make the implications literal:
"It was always this ending. For me, the graphic novel had no ending essentially, and didn't explain anything. It had a few frames where they were insinuating something, so I kept writing that version of the story in my head. I go, 'Oooh. That must mean that. That must mean there's something else going on.' So, to me, it was very much from the graphic novel like a painting that was unfinished, so the ending was from that. It was always that version. And there were different rhythms of how to convey that ending. And there were various versions of conveying that ending, but it was always that ending."
But I think Shyamalan made a poor decision here because that ambiguity would allow us to focus more on themes of the picture and leave us thinking about what time and mortality mean to us. It may not be uplifting to leave an adult Trent and Maddox on the beach to live out their final day, but at least that's an ending that makes us think about our own lives and what we consider important. When you move the ending to, "And there was an evil pharmaceutical company behind it the whole time!" that's the answer to a question the film was never asking beyond a superficial explanation. Yes, I suppose it's nice to have that answer, but it's resolution without catharsis. Knowing that the fake hotel people went to jail is comforting I suppose, but is that what Old is supposed to be about? If anything, everything we've seen to this point is that life isn't fair and that justice is fickle. There's no good reason all those people on the beach should have died.
One could argue that Shyamalan is making an ironic reveal here and that those who died on the beach had their lives cut short in favor of medical discoveries that would lengthen the lives of countless others. But again, is that utilitarianism of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few really what this movie was about? The emotional core of the film is really between Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), and how the bitterness and enmity between them doesn't really matter when time is short. In the end, all that really matters is the people you love and the importance of family. That has nothing to do with a nefarious pharmaceutical company that's using people as unwitting participants in medical experiments.
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Source: https://collider.com/old-ending-explained/