I would have guessed the ship would hit ground long before it did.
I did check out some videos of this happening IRL but those are at ports where the sea bottom is going to be deep enough for the ships. (I can say one thing from those videos, the ship should have been blowing it’s horn)
In most beaches, you are correct, a very few have a sharp drop off.
They are supposedly on Long Island, but I do not know where.
Here is a map-
I wondered the same thing. I thought it was very effective, though. I have a bit of a phobia
when it comes to large structures anyway and that giant thing with it’s wake freaked me right out. It felt realistic and not completely implausible 
I assume the beach was on one of the barrier islands like Fire Island. This photo shows the first true tanker grounded there in 1893. I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern tanker behaved like the one in this awful pointless movie if it was grounding on a sand bar.
I thought the same thing as I was watching.
But then I considered the weight of the ship and its momentum and it seemed plausible.
mmm
Here’s a video of ships being purposely run agound to be broken up. Granted, these are empty of cargo so lighter than the ship in the movie, but the principle is the same.
I would run away from the ship instead of across it’s path.
And IMO that would be wrong.
As it’s approaching, you have no idea how far up onto the beach it might run before it stops. There’s an insane amount of inertia behind it, and you don’t know the contour of the bottom versus how much ship is underwater.
Conversely, if you run transverse to the ship’s path, the instant you’re beyond its width, you’re safe. You might get wet, or knocked down by the wake, but you’re not going to be crushed. Add another 20 lateral feet after that and life is easy.
From the various real-world vids of real world ships running onto beaches, you’ll find the length of ship left on the beach is greater than the width. And vastly greater than the half-width of the ship. Which is the worst-case distance you have to run if the ship is exactly boresighted on your beachtowel.
Otherwise known as the Prometheus School of Running Away from Things.
I don’t know what the actual physical outcome would be if a tanker was to run aground like that, but as for whether it would happen at all, I got on IMDB while I was watching it to get info on one of the actors, and under the ‘goofs’ section somebody had posted that a anker would never run aground like that if they lost GPS. They have actual humans watching where they’re going, and manual controls.
I also wondered about the planes just dropping out of the sky. I think a commercial airliner would be in a lot more trouble than a tanker, losing all connection with the outside world to arrange a landing, but the pilots could still control the plane, right?
ETA: @Telemark two above.
It is instinctual for prey animals to run directly away from a pursuing predator. And that is correct behavior on open ground, since if the prey took off at an angle, the predator could run towards where the prey is going, and “cut the corner” so to speak, thereby closing the distance more easily. “Run straight away as fast as possible and turn or jink side to side only as the predator is about to pounce” is the winning maneuver.
However that instinctual behavior is bad when animals are fleeing trains or cars. Stepping aside would be quick, easy, and utterly save them from danger, but they don’t understand that trains and cars are constrained to staying on the tracks / roads, while they are not.
I suppose some people who haven’t thought about this at all, or who have been surprised into a panic reaction, might do the instinctual thing.
As to ships, there have been accidents where merchant ships have crashed because nobody was driving and the computer goofed or failed, somebody fell asleep, or a was drunk or … . Anything commenting about actual real-world practice needs a “should” in there somewhere. Which the anonymous poster you cited left out of their comments.
A far more common way for ships to crash is loss of steering and/or engine control. This is real:
It was also deliberate, using the “lithobraking” so favored by unsuccessful space flights. Works every time. But very similar events have occurred due to human inattention.
As to planes, loss of GPS leaves the plane fully flyable. Depending on whether we’re talking a Cessna or a Boeing, how many other unrelated nav systems they have, and how skilled and aware the pilots are, and how crappy the weather, total loss of GPS might be almost transparent, mildly inconvenient, or leave a bewildering search for “Where the hell are we, and how can we find where we can go in the fuel-time remaining?”
I’ve not seen the movie, but ref wiki it seems to posit hacker-driven destruction of computerized nearly-everything. Assuming this leads to total loss of all satellite and ground-based navigation aids (even the 1950s analog ones that are now monitored and controlled via internet), and all of FAA radar and ATC voice radio …
This would leave less capable planes in a crack. They’d be at the mercy of finding good enough weather to see the ground, and following old-fashioned maps. Those might be paper, or they might on a self-contained uninfected iPad. But in either case it’s a matter of the pilot already knowing roughly where they are, matching what they can see of the ground to the map, and from that happy condition, picking a suitable airport & following the map + ground until they can see it. OTOH, those sorts of airplanes generally can be safely force-landed in farm fields or on roads if that was the least bad option on offer. You still need to see the ground from a decent height, and you still need enough forward visibility to find something that looks safe enough to use as makeshift runway, but you’ll (probably) walk away fine even if you never stumble on an airport.
Substantially all modern bizjets or airliners could get itself close enough to a compatible airport without outside help. Assuming no on-board malfunctions. Unless the weather is really foggy / gross they could find a runway and get well-enough aligned to land. It might take a couple tries worst-case, but for the more typical bad-ish weather cloudy / rainy day where the airport appears out of the murk a mile or two away, even a less than ideal position versus the runway can be corrected in time. Or, go around and try again, now armed with the knowledge that the real runway is roughly X distance left/right and Y distance fore/aft versus where your computers think it is. So next time fly about that much offset versus what the computer thinks is on course / on path and you’ll be close enough to the actual correct path when you see the runway next time to land on it.
Ships running aground and planes just falling out of the sky in the movie (in good weather, mind you) just because communications and GPS was wiped out is completely unrealistic. They sort of handwave it away by not really explaining anything, so you can head-canon other reasons those things happened, I suppose. Another annoyance I had with this movie is the Tesla scene. If you wiped out GPS and cell service, they couldn’t have autonomously collected and blocked the roads. The writers seemed to have a pretty low level of awareness of how the tech actually works.
Seriously! Add to that the fact they discussed it long enough before moving!
“Gee, look at that enormous freighter heading directly towards this isolated beach. I wonder if there is anything wrong?” DUH!
I doubt anyone is on board because the ship appeared to be totally devoid of a crew. Maybe it’s one of those supernatural/horror movies in the Bermuda Triangle genre.
As it was, shall it ever be.
I read the wiki plot summary. What a nonsensical movie. “The deer are not what they seem.” 
I saw the clip without audio, so don’t know what they were saying, but by the time of the first sighting, it was time to GO! It wasn’t going to stop, turn or anything in that range.
Was kinda fun to watch.
“It’ll stop, right?”
Someone has never piloted a boat and it shows
If you hate them on the surface, wait’ll you see em underwater! Join us!
If that is a Panamax sized tanker then it has a draft of about 40 feet. I would be shocked if the water was 40 feet deep so close to shore on a beach. Although, it looks to be riding high in the water (so likely not loaded) which may take that draft down to 25-30 feet(ish).
