The Old Guard (2020)

The concept of immortality is, at first blush, a fun one: You get to live through history, be involved in it, see the outcomes, and maybe get treated like a god somewhere in there.
On the other hand, it would also be the most soul-crushingly lonely thing ever: everyone you ever loved would die of disease or old age before your eyes, while your chances to love again become more and more minuscule. Age gaps already affect humans with our current life-spans. How could you form a meaningful bond with someone who’s living a normal life when you’ve seen eons of history?

And that’s the underlying question that “The Old Guard” (2020) asked.

Andy (Charlize Theron) was the oldest immortal on earth. They never gave her exact age, but when she mentioned her full name, it was something very clearly Greek, so I guessed she was probably 2000 years old. She had three friends: Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), who fought each other during the Crusades, and Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army.
There was discussion of two other immortals who’d fallen by the wayside with time; one who died during a war with the Mongols, and another who’d been locked away in an iron crate and left somewhere in the Atlantic during the Salem Witch Trials.

Obviously it sounds weird to call these people “immortals” and then mention that one died during a war: it was clarified that their cells didn’t suffer senescence like ours do (the shortening of the telomeres at the ends of our DNA that ultimately result in our bodies failing), and they had a super healing factor, like Wolverine.
Unlike Wolverine, who’s powers seemed to wear off over the course of approximately 300 years, per the world-building of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (2009) and “Logan” (2017), the immortals in “The Old Guard” seemed to exist for an indeterminate amount of time. They established that at some point, even their wounds would be too great for their healing powers to recover from, but by and large, death was not a concept they feared.
As there only seemed to be seven immortals throughout all of human history, it wasn’t like there was a particularly solid set of data to establish lifespans or causes of perma-death.

The movie had dual A-plots: finding the newest immortal, Nile (Kiki Layne), and avoiding capture by the psychopath pharma-bro Merrick (Harry Melling).
Nile was a U.S. Marine who died in combat, then returned to the mortal coil as her body was being returned to base. Megan and I determined that “death” appeared to be the activating event to trigger someone’s immortality powers.
Merrick, who’d heard the rumors of people with impossible healing factors, wanted to experiment on the immortals; ostensibly to help the human condition, but ultimately to make a buck. I would like to describe him as cartoonishly evil, that no human would be so cruel for the sake of making money, but Martin Shkreli exists in our world, so Merrick was not a stretch of the imagination.

By and large, it was an enjoyable action film. The “one woman army” concept worked well and didn’t feel unreasonable in a movie about a woman who had fought in every major war in history and appeared to have mastered every weapon and form of hand-to-hand comment during her eternity of existence. While it was clear that she never enjoyed being injured, it clearly didn’t affect her enough to make Andy or her companions stop trying to help humanity at large.

At one point near the beginning of the movie, Andy commented that no matter what they did, things never got better. From a living-standards perspective, this is obviously a ridiculous statement, as diseases are (roughly) under control now and technology has made the world smaller and easier to connect with.
However, from her perspective of spending a massive chunk of history trying to make humans get along better, her comment made sense - the Mongols didn’t have nukes and the Civil War didn’t function with long-range smart-bombs. Humanity may be more civil on the surface, but as a species, we are really good at killing each other in new and creative ways, which must be absolutely heartbreaking to see when you have the misfortune of seeing every single iteration of every death machine.

As Megan and I determined: Andy must have been fluent in just about every language in history, as she would have learned Ancient Greek, then Roman, all the Romance languages, the Cyrillic languages, Mongolian, and anything in between. Frankly, I’m kinda surprised that they didn’t toss in a gag about Andy randomly switching languages as she spoke, simply because she had so many crammed into her head.

The special effects for this were almost exclusively limited to practical effects for gore and blood, but this wasn’t nearly as gory as it could have been, considering the “R” rating it earned for cursing.
Kudos to director Gina Prince-Bythewood for that restraint.

The soundtrack was present, but nothing notable nor distracting, so no comment there in either direction, though I definitely think they could have made something epic sounding to accompany a warrior who’d fought through the ages.

This was another Netflix creation, based on “The Old Guard” comic books. They did a great job telling a self-contained story that left the door wide open for a sequel without kneecapping its own climax.

If you have some time, this is a great movie to watch from the comfort of your couch.