The Old Guard dir. by Gina Prince-Bythewood
IDs: Gay, Chronic Illness, Terminal Illness, Sapphic, POC
Director IDs: POC
The Old Guard, based on the comics by Greg Rucka follows a group of immortal mercenaries who have been responsible for keeping humanity safe for hundreds of years. The oldest, Andromache, has been alive for thousands of years. The story follows the discovery of a new immortal, Nile, as well as the attempts of a pharmaceutical company to track down the mercenaries in order to test them and discover how their immortality works in order to profitize it. The story features not one, but two queer storylines. The first is Andy herself, whose former partner, Quynh, was locked in an iron chamber and thrown into the sea during the Salem Witch trials. Because the mercenaries’ immortality works through fast and intense regeneration, rather than stopping injury altogether, Quynh is destined to drown, awaken, and then drown again, over and over. When the movie is set, Quynh has already been lost at sea for hundreds of years. The second queer love story is between Joe and Nicky, two men who fought on opposite sides of the Crusades when they both realized their immortality. Joe was a Muslim soldier, while Nicky was one of the Italian Crusaders. They have been lovers for a thousand years, and their love is a true bright spot in the film. They are tender with one another, and they share small, intimate touches throughout the movie.They even have a big action-movie kiss when they are about to be killed. Both of these queer couples are also interracial and intercultural, which is great representation to see, especially in such a huge film.
Disability is presented in really interesting ways in this film. None of the mercenaries are conventionally disabled, and their immortality grants them, in many ways, super-abilities. Yet, their immortality can also disappear at any given time, as we learn later in the film. When this happens to Andy, we witness her decline and near-death. While the ability to die is hardly a disability, when one has been immortal for 7,000 years, it becomes a bit like one. Sometimes it seems that Andy’s injuries are just typical action-movie stuff, but other times, her health seems more like a chronic or terminal illness. The other mercenaries care for her as if she is a sick family member. She reflects on all of the time she has been alive, and she makes final wishes. It all reads very much like a terminal illness diagnosis, even though, technically, she is still alive and well.
We also see the ways that immortality impacts the mental health of all of the mercenaries, particularly through Nile, as she struggles with what this means for her future. We also learn in the last moments of the film that Quynh has somehow surfaced, and, while its hard to say for certain, it seems insinuated that she perhaps has some trauma, PTSD, or madness as a result of her time at the bottom of the ocean. The film takes the idea of immortality and explores what such a thing would mean for a person, and how it would affect them over such a long period of time, while also exploring what it would mean for that immortality to suddenly and irrevocably disappear. The Old Guard thus implements elements of the “superpowered supercrip,” while also questioning and examining the ways that immortality itself could serve as a disability.