Our expectations for movies change with the times. Released on Netflix in 2020, The Old Guard is not a good film; at least, it is not very good based on the expectations established in previous years by carefully written supernatural films, big budget action movies, and of course the mainstream blockbuster epics such as the Avengers series. But perhaps for a movie being viewed in 2021 that was released in 2020 after its filming had begun in May 2019, The Old Guard might be exactly the kind of movie that the broad streaming audience wants to consume.
Like the glorious superhero epics from the other side of the pandemic, The Old Guard is an adaptation of a comic book story. Rather than the standard upbeat, retro superhero vibe observable in the leading superhero movies, this film’s aesthetic is more oriented toward down-to-earth thriller action and supernatural mystique. It’s a folk supernatural mystery story that feels adjacent to dark fantasy, but it doesn’t fully pull together either of those aesthetics, partly due to the weird characterization of the second main character who is also the center of the movie’s supernatural elements.
Andromache the Schythian has potential as a fictional character and as the premise of the story; however, the portrayal of the character as written in the screenplay and portrayed by Charlize Theron simply does not live up to the concept. The Schythians were the scourge of the classical world, the living historical essence of the barbarian warrior archetypes brought out of time by such cult classics the Conan the Barbarian media. The Old Guard’s Andromache – who goes by her modernized name “Andy” in the story, appears to have been one of the horse-riding, bow-wielding female Scythian warriors of history and legend. She has continued her military career as a mercenary until the present time, her wounds inexplicably healing shortly after she is injured or briefly killed.
A moment in the film where Andromache’s name is spelled out on the screen in Greek stirs the mythological imagination in a way that I wish the film as a whole had been able to fulfill. The dark-haired, middle-aged Charlize Theron’s haggard manner in the film certainly suggests the world-weary misery of the ageless Amazon mercenary, but her speech, worldview, and mannerisms feel modern and shallow and completely unbefitting someone having foundational memories going back thousands of years. In comparison, the characters in the Avengers franchise who are Norse gods are at least portrayed with a theatrical veneer of antiquity, an otherness. Granting that someone who has lived for millennia will have had to have changed dramatically over the years and will have forgotten much that she once knew, it seems disappointing to find the perilous strangeness of a concept that should take us away from our everyday experience portrayed like an out of touch adult trying to talk like a teenager.
Fortunately, the other immortals lend a sense of timelessness. There is the reserved Nicky (played by Luca Marinelli) and the boisterous Joe (played by Marwan Kenzari). ”Nicky and Joe,“ as Andromache names them, are far and away the most colorful element of the story. While their relationship is depicted as a committed gay romance in the modern understanding, it also shows a more literary and classically romantic version of the concept of same-sex relationships.
The other immortal, Booker (played by Matthias Schoenaerts), is successful in roughly the same way that the flippant Avengers characters are successful; that is, he is theatrically interesting in his portrayal of an old fashioned kind of high class person, although the acting feels generic and worn-out.
The antagonist of the story, a corrupt corporate CEO, is the archetype of the privileged, spoiled, nerdy young white man. Seeing this negative stereotype functioning as a powerful and evil CEO feels interesting and unique, because a young, thin, rich man is in many ways an ideal for a good proportion of the traditional core fanbase for comics and associated media. This evil CEO is one of the billionaire overlords of the pharmaceutical industry.
A subversive critique of the pharmaceutical industry may be just what moviegoers want and need after the pandemic. This is not to say that the film or even the evil pharmaceutical CEO are all that subversive or counter-mainstream, but at least by either fate or design it has ended up pointing at one of the major sociopolitical themes of its time – the undeserved power of the pharmaceutical industry and that industry’s dangerous influence on government. It also references another related sociopolitical issue, the Snowden-era concern for surveillance.
The Old Guard doesn't present solutions to any of the contemporary problems it talks about, and it would be disingenuous to try to use it for social commentary rather than for simple entertainment. As simple entertainment, it may or may not deliver on the potential in its high concept and genres; however, it is probably the kind of movie that audiences are prepared to consume in the post-pandemic era.
Make no mistake, I don’t really like this movie. It’s not the kind of movie for which one would pull on one’s best pair of skinny jeans and drive out to the cinema to meet a date. However, it is the kind of movie that provides fundamental satisfaction for a little while, viewing from the couch at home. As such, it creates an intriguing suggestion of the richness of culture hidden in ancient history, and it makes a couple brief analogies to important problems in the modern world.