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sineala · 4 years ago

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The Old Guard

This post comes to you courtesy of the generous support of one of my Patreon patrons, who wanted to know what I thought of The Old Guard. This post contains some spoilers for both the movie and the comics.

So, a few days after it came out, my wife and I watched The Old Guard on Netflix. Tumblr had said a bunch of good things about it, and both of us basically cut our fannish teeth on Highlander fandom so we already had an automatic buy-in for a story about immortals. I knew it was based on a comic by Greg Rucka, but I had not, at the time, read the comic, although I am now reading it in order to write this post.

The premise of the film is as follows: a four-person team of immortals (Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Booker) makes a living hiring themselves out as mercenaries, fighting for causes that they believe are right. They are successful at this basically because their grasp of tactics appears to be (1) die, followed by (2) come back to life and (3) murder your attackers who are no longer paying attention to you because they think you're dead. Honestly, at this point, you wouldn't really need to be very good at the actual fighting part, I would think, but the film establishes that all of them are -- especially Charlize Theron as Andy -- because presumably it wants you to watch action sequences of everyone being badass, which they are. So, yeah. They take all the good-guy mercenary jobs that no one else can do because it would kill them, which is not a problem for them!

Anyway! The group's routine is interrupted by two major events: the discovery of Nile Freeman, a new immortal, who is a Marine serving in Afghanistan who survives getting murdered; and also the fact that one of their employers, Copley (played by Chiwetel Eijofor, whom you may remember as Mordo in Doctor Strange) has sold them out to the movie's Actual Villain, a Big Pharma CEO named Merrick (played by the guy who played Dudley in the Harry Potter series), who has (as far as I can tell) been given instructions to play this role just like he's Martin Shkreli, who is interested in finding the secret of their immortality, and whom you can tell is evil because he has his name in giant letters on the side of his building.

ME: Look, it's the villain! I've found the villain! MY WIFE: Other than Tony Stark, who actually puts their names on buildings like that except villains? It's just villains, right? ME: Uh. The president? The president definitely does that. (We make horrified faces at each other.)

Because we are Extremely Pedantic, we also spent a lot of time picking at how the characters' names and language abilities match up to their stated background. They all know a lot of languages, as you might expect, and the movie was determined to get through them without subtitles, which is an interesting choice but also kind of left some linguistic plot holes.

For example, Joe and Nicky claim to have met each other in the Crusades, with Nicky as (presumably) a Crusader and Joe as (presumably) a Muslim occupant of the area, although the movie doesn't specify this; Wikipedia gives Joe's name as Yusuf Al-Kaysani, which would at least fit that. Nicky is clearly Italian (as is Luca Marinelli, the actor who portrays him) and when he speaks Italian to the rest of the group we see that he definitely speaks modern Italian as spoken in Rome... which is absolutely, definitely not the language he grew up speaking, given that, among other things, Wiki lists the character's full name as Nicolò di Genova. I don't know if the writer of the screenplay (who I see now is also Greg Rucka) didn't know how much Italian dialects had changed in the last thousand years, if he thought that was good enough to be a nod to the character, or if there's some kind of backstory that didn't make it in where every so often Nicky decides to learn a modern dialect and keep his hand in, and also decides that that's the language he wants to use among his friends who would presumably understand several different dialects.

Also, the reveal that Andy's real name was in fact "Andromache of Scythia" was indeed badass but was slightly undercut by my wife yelling BUT THE SCYTHIANS DIDN'T SPEAK GREEK at the television.

Additionally, I feel like the movie could perhaps have been aware of the ways it chose to label on-screen locations, in which the countries were spelled out in large fonts with the cities above them. Places like LONDON, ENGLAND got their entire names spelled out, as did small French villages whose names I can no longer remember, but I guess AFGHANISTAN and MOROCCO and SOUTH SUDAN have zero cities, huh? However, the end of the movie did take place in PARIS which I guess unlike London is its own country now.

So the actual plot features the group of immortals trying to explain this whole immortality thing to Nile while being on the run from the people who are trying to turn them into Big Pharma, who wants to capture them and exploit the secret of their immortality. This is where it falls down a little for me, because the worldbuilding... gets a little shaky. They dream about each other when they're apart. Okay. Why? Sometimes they just stop being immortal and lose the capacity to heal and are dead in their next battle. Why? Why do they even exist? I just... wanted more answers than the movie gave me, and the pacing where I kept expecting there to be explanations wasn't there. There were a couple of scenes where Nile sat there in silence contemplating the fact that she would outlive her loved ones and my brain kept trying to insert Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" Granted, the Highlander canon explanation for immortality is deeply, deeply weird, but at least it tried. No, I can't believe I'm defending Highlander II either.

The characters, too, could have been more fleshed out. The bulk of the character development is given to Andy and Nile, and I'm not complaining about that -- they were great -- but Joe and Nicky and Booker only got maybe a few lines each. They would have felt so much more real if they'd just had a little bit more to them. Also I didn't understand Copley's arc at all, but saying more about that would be spoilery. I do like that they have definitely set themselves up for a sequel.

But even with what we got, there's a lot to love about the characters. If you're here for canonically queer characters, you will enjoy Nicky and Joe, who have been in a relationship for probably about a thousand years. They are minor characters as far as the overall plot goes, but what they do have is lovely, and there is a romantic declaration between them at one point that is absolutely beautiful and possibly the most fervent love declaration I can remember seeing in a movie since maybe... ever. If you also like your queerness more subtextual, though Andy is never portrayed as explicitly queer, her past friendship with a fellow immortal Quynh was shown as very intense, as is the role she takes here mentoring Nile into the world of immortality. Also she has a double-bladed axe (yes, we kept yelling BRING ME MY MAN-KILLING AXE at the television) and as we all know, the double-bladed labrys has in modern times become a symbol for lesbians. So there's that.

In addition to the characters of color who play important roles here -- Nile was my personal favorite, but there's also Joe and Copley and (in flashback) Quynh -- there's a lot of diversity behind the cameras as well, or so the internet informs me. The director (Gina Prince-Bythewood) is the first Black woman to direct a superhero movie, and the same is true of her editor (Terilyn Shropshire). And, furthermore, apparently 85% of the post-production crew were women. They didn't have to do that, and yet they did. It was nice.

I don't watch a whole lot of action movies these days because I usually find R-rated violence too... violent, but I found myself really liking almost all of the action sequences here. None of them felt gratuitous, and a lot of them really focused on the physicality of the immortals fighting in a way I liked, because I feel like people are probably going to fight differently if they know they can survive every single hit, and I think the movie portrayed that in a way that a lot of superhero comics and movies don't. My favorite fight scene is definitely the one between Nile and Andy at the beginning, when Andy has trapped her on a plane and it's extremely close-quarters fighting and also extremely brutal. They don't stop basically until Nile breaks enough bones that she can't get up anymore, because until then she's going to keep trying, which is both kind of horrifying and a great character note. And they didn't film it like it was a Sexy Catfight! It was so good.

Also, the soundtrack is really good, and I've found myself streaming it on Spotify all week. I didn't know any of the songs in the movie, but there's a lot of hip-hop and -- okay, I don't even know if this is a genre? -- specifically a lot of hip-hop with an electronic/industrial sort of beat, which I thought was really great and livened up the fight scenes even more; "Going Down Fighting" did a really good job getting me in the mood for the final confrontation with the villain, and... yeah, it's all good. Someone made a playlist on Spotify that will come up if you search for it.

So, yeah. It's on Netflix. It's not without flaws (mostly, explaining how the hell immortality works, and a couple of pacing issues), but it's a really satisfying superhero movie.

That's the movie. Onto the comic, which I am just now starting to read as I write these words. Whee!

So The Old Guard: Opening Fire is a 2017 five-issue Image Comics series written by Greg Rucka, with art by Leandro Fernández, and there's also a 2019 sequel, The Old Guard: Force Multiplied, by the same creative team, also with five issues. I have not actually read any of Rucka's work before now because he is mostly famous for his DC work, but I have heard good things about it, especially his Wonder Woman run.

Anyway. The art is very stylized, with a minimal color palette, and it's very pretty but I honestly found it hard to parse sometimes. Many of the characters have very weird noses. Yes, noses. It's basically mostly in Andy's and Nile's POVs, like the movie, and as far I can tell Andy is explicitly queer, because unless I am entirely misreading this panel in issue #1, here she is in bed with a woman in one panel. Whee. Also there are some nice epigraphs at the beginning of each issue.

Okay, so, the plot here is basically the plot of the movie. There is still no explanation of why immortality exists. But even so, there are some fun character moments that didn't make it into the movie -- for example, Andy saying smartphones are too hard to use and she liked the old ones better, only for the rest of her team to say that she couldn't use those either. I think you get a better sense of Andy's world-weariness in the comic. There are also other, now-dead Immortals mentioned, like Noriko, who "went overboard off the Horn." Quynh is not one of them; Quynh basically is Noriko, which is because they cast a Vietnamese actress who asked if her character could be Vietnamese too, which seems perfectly reasonable to me. But anyway, in the comics, she's Noriko. Weirdly, Andy's full name, as she tells Nile when they meet, is Andronika ("man-victory") rather than Andromache ("man-battle," in case you were wondering); I think the movie made a better choice because Ἀνδρονίκα has exactly two attestations in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, whereas Ἀνδρομάχη has all that shiny name recognition of being shared by the wife of Hector and also the queen of the Amazons and will ping viewers as a Greek name, and therefore ancient, even if it can't be the name she was born with. (There are five for "Andronike" and four more for "Andromacha" so they actually have about the same number of total attestations, as far as I can tell, when you consider the alpha/eta alternation in how various Greek dialects mark feminine nouns.)

(Yes, you totally wanted a review by someone who looks up character names in the LGPN. Don't lie.)

Plotwise, Andy gets all of the initial exposition in for Nile before they get to the safehouse, which Copley has already gotten to before they get back, so Booker is bleeding on the floor and Nile doesn't get to meet Joe or Nicky at this time, and I am also glad they changed that for the movie. But, don't worry, Joe and Nicky's romantic declaration is still in here. We also get Andy pondering the last time she was in love, with a human who grew old.

Oh, and we get Andy's age: 6,732. And by issue #5 her name has changed to Andromache, because what even is continuity? I guess Andromache is her name now.

So Nile finally meets Joe and Nicky when she rescues them and also, uh, that plot point where Andy might die? Totally not a thing here. Nope. And no "surprise! even more immortals!" end-credits moments either.

Basically, I feel like every change they made to the script for the movie really strengthened the story, and even though I thought the movie could have used more character moments, it's way better than how the characters are separated for even longer in the comic. Nile rescuing the team means a lot more when she has met them before, you know?

So Force Multiplied starts us off with Andy, Joe, Nicky, and Nile, because Booker is still on time-out. They are in the middle of a car chase, and Booker's off getting himself kidnapped by someone who wants to know where the others are. The villain of the piece turns out to be Noriko, who is still alive, whom Booker had never had a chance to meet and apparently had never heard of. So, basically, a lot like the Quynh plot that the movie is teasing.

Overall it's a little less action-filled than the first one, which had multiple splash pages of nothing but violence; this one is a little more character-driven and explores the relationship, such as it is, between Andy and Noriko, as well as Nile coming to terms with her immortality, as well as with what everyone else has done over the years. It does have a bunch of violence at the end, though.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I definitely wasn't expecting where that was heading. There's apparently going to be a third volume, and I am looking forward to it, whenever it exists.

(Although, now that I think about it, the ending is a lot like a fan-favorite moment of Highlander: The Series, but I think if I said which episode you would know exactly what the ending was.)

So, yeah! The Old Guard! I can't say as I feel particularly fannish about it -- there's nothing that makes me yearn to fill in the gaps in canon -- but the movie was really good and you should see it. And you should read the comics if you're into that.

#posts i actually wrote

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mynameisdreartblog · 6 years ago

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The Pious Coonass of Marksville

My life is a dangerous one: I’ve inherited my family’s vice of always being involved in mafia affairs, and I’m merely the receiver of the latest bit of trouble. Currently, I’m working at a steel mill trying to ensure a livelihood for my wife and only son. We’ve lived on the outskirts of New Orleans ever since my greater family immigrated here from Northern Italy, and if you’re familiar with how the American nation treats Italians, well, I shouldn’t have to explain why I’m caught up within mafia. But long story said shortly: My current state is the result of my older brother Giorgi angering the wrong people at the wrong time with counterfeit billing when they — get this — wanted legitimate currency for their loans. Now, not only is he wanted by his clients pissed that they got fraudulent money, they’re blackmailing him by threatening to get the police against him for what’s technically a crime. At first, he attempted to flee New Orleans and move west, but his paranoia made him think that his angry clients would just chase after him if he did so. Thus, he pursued alternative methods which required my innocence being compromised and my family’s safety being jeopardized. He came up to me and demanded that I find a way to pay back his clients as fast as possible through any methods I can; he said all of this to me holstering the gun in his pocket like he was never my brother. Despite his demanding tone, he still advertised this as a situation of relying on “brotherly love” and stressed repeatedly that there was no pressure involved. I reacted with initial skepticism at first towards this, partially because I didn’t wanna get involved in any of Giorgi’s dirty work, and partially because there’d be no feasible way for me to generate the money he was asking for. Then — and this is something I never thought he’d say in my life — he said that he could help me escape my poverty if I helped him with this, and that I’d have complete support from his gang. Now, I wasn’t the type to be tempted easily into sin, but if you’re my sibling coming to me with the promise of lifting myself out of poverty and guaranteeing a loyal squad of protectors alongside the initial offer, I have next to no choice but to take it.

After many days of my wife scolding me for risking our safety and my son not understanding the weight of the circumstances, we arrive on the western road leading out of New Orleans into the greater swamps of this dumpy state. In 1912 on a hot summer night, I find myself in a situation where I must make a ridiculous amount of money back in around three weeks’ time before both Giorgi and I possibly get a wake-up call from some very angry people. My car’s guzzling gas along the beaten, undeveloped roads leading out of the big city towards the isolated villages outside, and I’m wandering this path for reasons my consciousness still hasn’t recognized: Was it to get away from the problems entirely? Was it to find someone else willing to get involved in the mess? Or was I about to crash, die, and put the weight all on my family and Giorgi? I was driving into sheer darkness until I had a sudden realization that recalled the deepest parts of my memory’s state several months ago, specifically when it was in a saloon. For reasons still unknown, the personable bartender told me stories about a strange Cajun woman who lived in the small, rural town northwest of here called Marksville. What was known about her was that her name was Tracey Couvillion and that she was particularly known for her obsession with seeking and supposedly hunting the “unholy.” And what that meant, according to the bartender, was that she thought that there lied unholy creatures in the grand plantations she was familiar with seeing towards her inward travels in the state. From this memory, I felt elevated, like I was able to get out of this situation if I arrived at the insane conclusion this was heading to. Before long, I stopped my car on the rough, grassy terrain on the side of the road and from here, I remembered another key detail that required me to stop and regain my stream of thought.

Before I left that saloon, the bartender mentioned that there were various rumors about Ms. Couvillion, and one of them was that she held a hidden stash of treasures that she hoarded from all the plantations she invaded: Primarily those who she suspected to be possessed by unholy creatures. In his head, she saw himself as a vampire hunter that protected the citizens of South Louisiana from the villainy of the demons that haunted the halls of the state’s oldest plantations. I’ve since forgotten the rest of the details due to my intoxication at the time, and the bartender seemed to forget where they were as his speech went on and on. As the moment passed, I stood there in my car, taking in the atmosphere of cicadas and frog croaks and filled with renewed purpose that I knew was a last resort: It was either this or risking a bullet. I took out the state map and traced a route from where I was northeast towards Marksville to meet Ms. Couvillion and see if the legends I’ve heard held any water, or if the bartender was as drunk as I was… Traversing there was as much as a challenge as believing my outcome, and along the way I could think of nothing but the man my brother was: Stout, insensitive, yet all too ready to forgive. He was a man who’d mess up twelve times in front of you and apologize an equal amount, and you’d be left wondering if he had any sorta commitment skills. He just couldn’t decide between being a reckless personality that claimed he didn’t care of anyone else’s feelings yet give in as soon as he realized he’d suffer the consequences of the first attitude. It makes sense why he was so nonchalant when he told me to help him with the mess he got into, disregarding the danger he was putting me and my family in.

Disappointed, I thought about throwing this all away and returning to New Orleans, finding a way for Giorgi to escape the city, and continue to live the rest of my days sleeping with a gun at my bedside. But, I remembered the journey I took to get here with the energy of the epiphany keeping me trucking; clearly there were signs that the only path this could go down is a progressive one. Whether or not the noise of the cicada beeps and the frog croaks were affecting my ability to use rationality, that didn’t change that I was committed now, more committed than Giorgi could be… The contrasting path seemed more appealing, which was towards the road from which I came, but I wasn’t going down it for escape, but rather for the pure curiosity to know if a Tracey Couvillion existed. The only waypoint to know where I was positioned in the southward road was the reservation for the Tunica-Biloxi Indians. As much as I wanted to seek their help, I also felt awkward intruding; I’m already in a village at night where I’ve greeted not one soul and made a name for myself as a ghostly traveler… I was standing outside the doors of the reservation and trying to pinpoint where the abode of a little Cajun missus would be, until I was approached by a figure that might’ve intruded as assumedly as I did. This figure was wrapped in a brown cloak that shrouded the face of the wearer as much as it did their arms, but the piece of wardrobe that stuck out the most were the shiny shoes that reflected the moonlight rather well. Their steps became louder as they began coming closer towards me, and I was filled with a mortal dread; what do these unfamiliar people possibly do towards those who don’t greet themselves formally and insist they arrive at late hours?

The figure had long, white hair that bristled outside of their cloak, and it swayed rhythmically with the movements. Immediately, my altered mind rushes to conclusions as to who this can be: Could it be Giorgi who somehow followed me all the way here? Could it be a Tunica Indian wanting to speak with me before they thought I’d enter? Could it be a resident of Marksville trying to assess the threat I could be before they call police? Or could it possibly be Ms. Couvillion? This place was driving me to insane assumptions that wracked my mind and turned my silent silhouette into a chafing one, but all of this stopped when I heard a raspy, feminine voice come from the figure: “Cher étranger, ça va?” All of my previous assumptions were tallied the moment I heard a funky accent speak French towards me; it had to be the mythologized Tracey Couvillion. My tongue was chafing, — as was every other part of my body — but I had to say something I hope she’d understand: “Um, je p-parle pas français? I’m deeply sorry, I don’t speak French.” The figure tilts her head slightly upwards and says: “Oh, dat’s alright; we get a lotta visitors ‘ere who can’t speak da local dialect.” I was relieved by the sudden friendliness contrasting the ominous appearance. “Tell me, mon cher étranger, what’re ya doin’ around here?” I have a newfound confidence, but the rest of my body is still chafing from the scariness of the prior appearance, still I was unsure if this friendliness was an act of hers. After all, the stories I’ve heard about Ms. Couvillion tell me that she doesn’t take kindly to visitors or anyone who shows up ominously, but the fact that I’m believing this figure is her reveals the impact on my mental state: I blame my damn brother for this.

“Oh, mon cher étranger, is it dis cloak dat’s makin’ you so afraid of me? Let me fix dat fo’ you.” The figured lifted her brown cloak to reveal that she was neither Giorgi, a Tuluca Indian, or someone who’d call the cops, but rather the face of an old woman. The first thing I noticed about her physical complexion was that she had the nose of my wife: Everything else was foreign but that nose was nearly identical. “Pauvre ti bête, you looked like you was terrified of me. I somewhat like dat you was afraid; it gives my britches some vigor and my person some material.” After that comment, I couldn’t help but notice she had the same attitude as my son: He’d always try to think of new ways to make himself intimidating so that his bullies would back off. “If you can get anything outta your tremlin’ voice, make sure it’s whatever your name is.” She said with a sleek grin, revealing the blade of sawgrass wedged between her aged teeth. I replied with the fact that I saw her in natural familiarity and not the mystery of the eerie community. “My name is Rossi: an Italian-American that lives on the outskirts of New Orleans. If you’re wondering why I came here, then I can gladly and exasperatingly explain why.” Her half-toothy grin was covered by her bottom lip now, and something prompted her to walk closer to me, to an almost personable distance. Keep in mind all of this was occurring close to my vehicle, so perhaps (if she was a threat) she sensed how close I was to an escape plan. “Well, I don’t mind me a good story, so raconter your history if you must.” Well…

To be continued…

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