The Old Guard is the incredible summer superhero movie that we need and I’m not just saying that because the COVID 19 pandemic effectively canceled the summer movie season. This film is based on graphic novels by Greg Rucka but there are some major changes during the adaptation including one heart-stopping scene which was not in the source material at all.
Some of my ex-colleagues of the CIA feel differently. We’ll talk about some of the biggest differences between movies and books and reveal the one graphic novel scene the author refused to cut be warned there are spoilers ahead.
The premise of The Old Guard is that there’s a group of essentially immortal people who go around trying to do good and succeeding for the most part but I say that they’re essentially immortal because while they can recover from grievous bodily harm their healing abilities can vanish suddenly and without warning.
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Although Andy and her friends have seen it happen to others they feel pretty invincible particularly Andy who’s been around the longest so it’s quite surprising when her luck finally runs out and she finds herself unable to heal even the slightest of wounds and this was also surprising for fans who have read the comic book where Andy’s powers remained.
According to The Old Guard director Gina Prince-Bythewood by the wood, she was worried that the stakes of the film wouldn’t be enough to maintain audience attention after all if you know the hero is going to be completely fine at the end of every battle.
The fights become a lot less entertaining so in order to ensure the audience was on the edge of their seats she removed Andy’s ability and made us wonder if this would be her last mission even though we didn’t see much of Andy’s old associate Quinn.
the scenes we did see her in were pretty intense, to say the least, but her brief appearances were enough to see that she’s different from her comic book counterpart right away a major change is that her name is Quinn and not Noriko like it is in the source material.
She’s played by Vietnamese actress van veronica go while Noriko was Japanese there was also a change in how she found herself trapped beneath the ocean which I’m going to guess had a major impact on how she viewed her former BFF Andy who was supposed to find her but gave up after a few quick decades in the comic.
The characters washed aboard during a storm while in the movie she was shoved in an iron maiden and dropped into the ocean as punishment for suspected witchcraft what was the reason for the switch well. According to author Greg Rucka, the answer is simply money filming a big storm would have been pricey so they unceremoniously pushed Quinn into the sea instead.
Although this movie was budget-based Raqqa fully supports the change and says that it highlighted just how awful people can be according to Kiki lane she was excited to work with academy award-winning actress Charlize Theron and the two got off to a rather intense start this fight fuel plane scene was the very first one lane filmed for The Old Guard and it’s an action sequence.
You won’t find in the source material when the group of immortals dream of Nile freeman, Andy volunteers to track her down while her friends work on tracking down Copley but for some reason, Nile isn’t happy about being kidnapped by Andy and puts her marine training to good use by fighting back.
Even though this scene was not in the comics Charlize believes that it’s a prime example of physical storytelling which helped establish the characters of Nile and Andy and set up their relationship with one another the space really lent itself to the storytelling of the fight right.
While Nile didn’t have the same experience as Andy this battle demonstrated that she has the same heart not only was the plane fight uncharted territory but according to Theron it took her four months to learn that flip move and make it look as though she’d been doing it for centuries.
The plane scene was new ground for Nile’s character and so was pretty much everything else about her Nile is the newest immortal and the film focuses on her coming to terms with leaving her old life behind and fitting in with a bunch of ancient superpowered people.
So, really a classic coming-of-age film we learn about her family and how her dad lost his life during his military service and her mom struggled to keep Nile and her brother safe she demonstrates her incredible combat skills and her unflagging heroism when she goes back to rescue her friends after learning of booker’s betrayal but in the comic’s joe and Nicki got away from Eric.
On their own Nile is a much smaller character in the book and she’s not nearly as well-rounded or compelling as she is in the movie while some other characters had their backstories trimmed down Nile actually got a lot more added in Marvel’s Doctor Strange.
She would tell a jewel for played Carl Mordo who turns his back on the mystic arts and vows to hunt down its users and strip them of their powers in The Old Guard he plays James Copley who turns his back on the immortals and vows to hunt them down.
So, Merrick can study their powers I’d love to talk about if this means The Old Guard takes place in the marvel cinematic universe but I only have about five minutes left and that’s barely enough time for me to kick off a good conspiracy theory anyway even though Copley is trying to hunt down our heroes it’s hard to not feel sorry for him after we learn that he watched his wife pass away from a painful battle with else she couldn’t talk at the end.
He believes that the potential benefits of testing on the immortals outweighs the ethical issues of capturing and experimenting on them at least up until they start showing up and making a mess in his apartment but in the comics, there isn’t a greater mitigating motivator to his actions he’s simply a guy employed by Merrick who’s trying to earn a paycheck.
He also doesn’t know about the immortals’ extensive history of important people saving so early on as he does in the film even though Andy’s the character with the most amount of backstory we learn relatively little about who Andromache of Cynthia really was.
Although there are some clues here and there Andy doesn’t like to talk about her history and considering what happened with her and Quinn it’s hard to blame her but the comic book goes into more details about her many battles as well as her origin story finding out that you’re an immortal would be a lot more fun if it didn’t involve a would-be fatal wound.
In the source material, we learned that Andy made this discovery at the hands of a woman she viewed as a mother so she’s already experienced a severe betrayal at the beginning of her journey which makes what booker did to her and her friends even more painful and speaking of that dastardly booker he had his own sob story about discovering his superhuman ability which was a lot sadder before he betrayed all of his pals’ booker in the movie.
We learned that he came back to life in 1812 in that he fought with napoleon during the invasion of Russia which spoiler alert didn’t go well but in the comics, there’s another part of his story that may have hinted all the more heavily at his eventual betrayal. He didn’t just lose his life in battle he lost his life at the hands of his own men after he was caught trying to desert apparently he didn’t learn his lesson the first time around according to director Gina prince by the wood booker and Andy went through similar experiences in their past but Andy has always dealt with things like a true warrior.
She believes that there’s no giving up no matter how painful things can be and booker believes that when the going gets tough he gets out of there we saw a hint of Merrick’s true hideous nature when he tested joe’s healing ability but he’s a much more loathly character in the comic books and that’s saying something since in the movie.
He’s a money-hungry corporate fat cat played by Harry Melling aka Dudley Dursley from the harry potter franchise but let’s not gloss over his accomplice Dr. Mita Kozak who is certainly culpable in this whole immortal abduction scheme in the source material Merrick’s doctor is a man named Dr. Ivan and he is not overpowered by Nile.
In fact, he actually lets Joe and Nicki go but since he did so after performing horrible and unethical experiments on them they returned the favor by taking him out hey they both watched him harm the loves of their lives what else do you expect in contrast Dr. Kozak had a much smaller role and aside from joe briefly admonishing her about her lack of ethics.
She wasn’t majorly involved we don’t see much of Andy interacting with non-immortals in The Old Guard unless you count the times that she decimated wave after wave of enemies but in the comics, we learned that joe and Nicki aren’t the only two immortals to engage in romantic relationships.
Although there was a moment when booker joked that Andy probably knew artist August Rodol biblically which may have been a nod to her more active love life in the book did you know him probably biblically and he was once in love with a freed slave named Achilles, who fought with the British in the revolutionary war he had the chance to grow old with Andy but since she really doesn’t do the whole growing old thing she left before he could learn the truth about her.
We saw that she and Quinn were close but in the comics, it’s clear that they weren’t strictly platonic pals it’s actually kind of interesting that they left this detail out since Glenn Rucka insisted that joe and Nicki’s romance be fully realized in the movie.
He made sure that the scene in which joe describes his love for Nicki while they’re being transported to Merrick was incorporated into The Old Guard movie, this scene came directly from the book and director Gina prince, by the way, said that it was a great source of inspiration when making the movie I don’t suppose it would be possible to get these chains off us.
Of course, there’s always the chance that we’ll learn more about Andy and Quinn’s relationship if there is a sequel and after that stinger, I can’t be the only fan who’s hoping for one Andy’s an incredible combatant who has saved countless lives and helped shape the course of human history is there anything that she can’t do well in the comics.
One of the things that she struggles with is using technology it sounds kind of silly but it makes sense to anyone who’s tried to help their grandparents set up an email account she comes from a time before technology and is not a fan of the modern world and all of its various electronic gadgets and doodads.
However, in the movie, Andy seems to accept today’s tech just fine. Right away she spots some tourists taking a selfie-and quickly offers to take a group photo so she can sneakily delete one with her in the background that’s pretty impressive.
For someone whose comic book counterpart can’t figure out the latest iPad interface, this Andy is all too aware of how difficult it is to disappear in the digital age which is why she demands that Copley use his skills to cover her tracks as penance for his betrayal.
Are you hoping for a sequel to The Old Guard after that teaser at the end tell us how you think this film stacks up against other superhero flicks in the comments section below? For more such content, keep watching this space.