Film / The Old Guard

The Old Guard is a 2020 Netflix/Skydance action-adventure film directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, based on the comic of the same name by writer Greg Rucka (who wrote the screenplay and produced) and artist Leandro Fernandez. It stars Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia (she goes by "Andy"), a mercenary who has lived for millennia, along with her younger comrades-in-arms: two veterans of the First Crusade, Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli), and the baby of the bunch, Booker (Matthias Schoenarts), a French soldier who fought for Napoleon.

Turns out, living in the modern era is a challenge none of the four envisioned, and staying hidden is becoming increasingly difficult as records become more comprehensive and social media becomes omnipresent. Tired from nearly endless fighting, Andy reluctantly agrees to do a second job for a former contact (Chiwetel Ejiofor), intending to take some time off afterward. But things are not what they seem, and the old warrior has to deal with unexpected fallout, as well as the awakening of a new immortal (KiKi Layne), the first in nearly two hundred years.

On June 30, 2021, Charlize Theron confirmed in an interview that a sequel was in development.

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This film provides examples of:

• Abandoned Area: The protagonists have a safehouse in a village outside Paris that has been abandoned because it's directly under a busy airport's flight path. When this hideout is compromised, they take shelter in an abandoned mine they discovered centuries ago.
• Action Girl: Andy, Nile, and in the past, Quynh.
• Adaptation Deviation: The twist of Andy losing her immortality as Nile joins is not in the original comic, as Andy remains immortal at the end and intends to meet Booker in a century. The film leaves the matter somewhat ambiguous, with Andy moving much more naturally than when she'd been wounded.
• Adaptation Expansion: The movie adapts the first volume of the comic, as well as elements of the second, which was published in the leadup to the movie. Like Quynh dropping in on Booker, Copley's research into the consequences of Andy's actions and his more heroic nature, and mention of Andy once being worshipped as a goddess.
• Adaptational Heroism: Copley has a a sympathetic motive for his actions, and comes to regret them, even being willing to backup Nile when she's about to Storm the Castle.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Of a technological sort. In the comic, it's showcased that only Booker (the youngest of the group) has any understanding of modern technology (Andy barely knows how to use an old flip-phone, let alone a smart one). Indeed, the comic has Nile realizing Booker is a traitor when he's able to "gather" information off a laptop inside an underground bunker as Andy doesn't grasp that "just because you have a computer doesn't automatically mean you're on the Internet." In the film, all of the group are shown to be tech-savvy with Andy easily using a smartphone (which makes sense as they're long used to adapting to the times they live in).
• Adaptational Name Change:
  • At Ngô Thanh Vân's request when she was cast, Noriko was renamed Quynh and made Vietnamese, as Vân is Vietnamese.
  • Andronika (Andy's real name in the first issue of the comic) was changed to Andromache, in Greg's own words, "because I changed her name".
• Adaptational Nice Guy: The immortals are a much more jaded bunch in the comics, and also more aggressive, even towards one another. In the film, they show a lot of affection towards one another, and while they are still skilled and deadly warriors, they are also more friendly and polite to non-combatants.
• Adaptational Skill: Andy knows her way around a smartphone in the film, unlike the comic where she has little skill with personal technology.
• The Alcoholic: Booker drinks notably more alcohol than any other charcacter. He regularly takes a swig of liquor from a hip flask and is drunk during the post-timeskip scene.
• And I Must Scream: Imprisonment and torture is the greatest fear of the immortals, as they cannot even hope to die of injury or old age to escape it. In particular, Quynh was locked in an iron sarcophagus and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean, where she's been drowning and reanimating over and over since the Middle Ages.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Played dramatically; Andy is a nihilistic atheist and suggests to the Christian Nile that if she already believes in God then she should be fully prepared to accept that she's immortal now.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: The older immortals have a penchant for using blades and melee weapons alongside firearms.
• Armor Is Useless: Downplayed. When fighting Mooks in full tactical gear, the Immortals either use their blades, which kevlar is generally poor against, or have such superlative skill they can land snap headshots in their unarmored faces. Blood spatter indicates the bullets are punching through their helmets on the way out, though.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: The RMS Titanic has been underwater in the Atlantic Ocean since 1912 and current estimates say that it may rot away entirely by 2050. By the same token, Quyhn's far smaller purely iron coffin would have taken far less time to rust to the point where she could break free from it. The coffin would have rusted enough for her to escape within decades, not 500 years.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: The team has horrible trigger discipline, routinely leaving their fingers on the trigger at all times contrary to safety guidelines. However, given the team's ages — Andy is literally twice as old as gunpowder — and the fact that they are all immortals with fast healing for whom an accidental gunshot is just a brief, if nasty, inconvenience they never learned proper gun safety. Nile, having been trained in the 21st century, is the only exception.
• Artistic License – Military: One of Nile's fellow Marines calls for a medic when she's injured, but a Marine would never call for a "medic," they'd call for a corpsman. The USMC doesn't have their own medics, instead relying on the US Navy Medical Corps personnel for combat medical care. While every infantryman is trained in field medicine, culturally the terminology would still be "corpsman."
• Audible Sharpness: Andy's ax, especially, sings when she wields it, though Nicky and Joe's swords have this as well.
• The Baby of the Bunch: Nile is the youngest immortal, only experiencing her first death at the beginning of the film (Andy even says "She's just a baby" on seeing a sketch of her). Booker, who fought under Napoleon, previously held this position.
• Badass Crew: Four (later, five) immortals who between them are skilled with virtually every kind of weapon, along with centuries of experience.
• Battle Couple: Joe and Nicky are lovers and mercenary comrades-in-arms — and have been for almost a thousand years.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Nile and Andy get as much blood and dirt on them as the guys, if not more. Andy especially is usually covered in a layer of grime.
• Been There, Shaped History: Andy assumes nothing she does matters, but Copley's research shows that she has saved numerous lives who in turn aid others or have descendants who do, from a woman whose daughter creates a groundbreaking diabetes treatment to others who save important lives.
  Copley: She saves a life and two, three generations later, we reap the benefits.
  Nile: She's in it... she can't see it.
• Bittersweet Ending: The already depressed Booker is cut off from the others for a century as punishment for his betrayal, but Andy has found new purpose in her life and is ready to guide the team in a new, more helpful direction — and Quynh has somehow freed herself.
• Blessed with Suck: An immortal can survive virtually any form of injury or death, but they still feel the wound and recovery. And one day, their immortality may just stop working, meaning they die permanently. In the meantime, they have to avoid being discovered by regular humans, because their immortality would result in Burn the Witch! or They Would Cut You Up. The only thing they can think of to do with their lives is a good deed here and there, which they can't even be sure is actually accomplishing anything.
• Body Horror: Nile's body is mangled after jumping off the skyscraper with Merrick to protect Andy. Thanks to her Healing Factor, she gets better. Merrick on the other hand...
• Boom, Headshot!: Subverted. Andy shoots Nile in the back of the head when she first tries to escape and Keane shoots Nicky in the mouth during the final battle. However, since they're immortal, they shake it off.
  Andy: You've got blood in your hair.
  Nile: Wonder why.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted. The team spends a lot of of the final battle passing each other new magazines. Likewise with the hit team in Sudan; they empty their weapons into the protagonists so they're caught with empty magazines when they come to life.
• Brought Down to Badass: Each immortal knows that at one point or another, it will simply "switch off" and they'll die like anyone else. When Andy keeps bleeding from a stab wound, she realises her time has come. They've still got centuries of combat experience, though, honed reflexes and coordination that give them stunning speed and power and an intuitive grasp of how to immediately neutralize any threat before them. As Booker says, Andy has "forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn". Andy takes point in the final fight, and at one point manages to deflect a bullet with an axe.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: In the final battle the immortals take turns taking bullets to protect the now-mortalized Andy. Possibly justified thanks to their Healing Factor, which is shown to rapidly repair internal damage.
• Bullying the Dragon: Downplayed in that the odds are to their advantage (there's five of them and two of the immortals, they're fully kitted out while Joe and Nicky are unarmed and chained up), but the soldiers in the van were still a bit too cocky when it came to Joe and Nicky, who are both immortal and have centuries of experience in combat. Mocking their relationship after Joe makes it clear just how much they mean to each other results in Joe and Nicky killing them all off-screen.
• Burn the Witch!: Quynh thinks this is what will happen to her and Andy, but the reality is far worse. Unusually, it seems that the witch hunters tried to hang them first, they just had to resort to more extreme measures after it became clear that hanging wasn't working.
• Car Cushion: Nile tackles Merrick out a window, the pair slamming into a car several dozen stories below. Subverted, in that Merrick doesn't survive the fall, and Nile clearly only survives by virtue of being effectively immortal.
• Casting Gag: Charlize Theron as Andromache of Scythia. A famous Amazonian warrior from Greek myths was named Andromache, and archeological findings related to said myths were found in the modern-day locations corresponding to ancient Scythia. Theron famously refused to play the Queen of the Amazons in Wonder Woman.
  • Merrick's insistence that Copley bring him all four immortals instead of just one is even funnier when you consider his previous role as Dudley Dursley.
• Catapult Nightmare: Nile suffers one thinking of the man she killed and then feeling Quynh drowning and resurrecting infinite times.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: What really makes the team deadly is that they've had hundreds—in Andy's case, thousands—of years to hone their skills, more than any non-immortal foe they face will ever have.
• Climactic Elevator Ride: As Nile gets on the elevator on her way to the 15th floor private lab where Andy and the others are being held for experimentation, she tells Copley to get out before the noise starts. For emphasis, the song “Going Down Fighting” by Phlotilla starts playing in the background. Inside the elevator, Nile mentally prepares for the incoming encounter with at least 30 shooters while watching the floor numbers ascending in the display.
• Combat Pragmatist: The four senior team members are all exceptionally skilled in this; centuries upon centuries of experience have left them with unequaled hand-to-hand technique, along with muscle memory which can't be matched. Just witness the "Killing Room" scene, where you have such gems as Andy firing a pistol with the barrel pressed directly against several mercs body armor (thus ensuring the round has enough energy to penetrate anything short of a steel or ceramic-reinforced vest), then when she finally runs out of bullets, hitting one of the men in the face with it. Joe kills one merc with his shotgun, then instead of wasting time working the slide to chamber another round, draws his scimitar and starts carving them up leaving Nicky openings to shoot them.
• Cool Sword: Booker, who had his initial military service in the early 1800s, is the only one of the "old" team who doesn't use a bladed weapon beyond a knife.
  • Andy uses a labrys, a double-headed axe from at least the time of Ancient Greece (and possibly earlier). She uses what looks to be a 18th century cavalry saber for the church massacre as well.
  • Joe, being an 11th-century Muslim warrior, uses a scimitar.
  • Nicky, being an 11th-century Crusader, uses a European longsword.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Merrick owns a company named after him, and has a goal of unlocking the secret to immortality to profit off of it. Even if that means unethical and painful experiments on live immortals. He even stabs them just to see proof that they're immortal.
• Crapsack World: Andy has begun to feel this way about the world as it currently exists; at one point she flat out says that it's getting worse instead of better.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Joe vs Keane in the climax. Keane is special ops, but Joe has centuries of experience, and is angry that Keane shot Nicky.
• Dirty Business: Nile feels this way after seeing the carnage Andy leaves behind at the church. She flatly says that she doesn't want to get used to that, and temporarily leaves the group.
• Disco Dan: Comes with the immortals being a Living Relic, to at least some degree. While Andy and the others have long gotten used to keeping up with the times, albeit with some difficulty, they still retain elements of their respective eras.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: Nile dreams of Quynh drowning and reviving over and over again.
• Driven to Suicide: Booker's motivation for betraying the team. He saw all three of his sons die, and the guilt has become too much for him to bear. He figures that if Merrick can learn why they can't die, perhaps he can learn a way to kill them.
• Drowning My Sorrows:
  • Implied. Booker deeply regrets his betrayal of the team and dreads his century-long exile. Before he's left alone, he has an emotional goodbye with Andy knowing that he will never see her again because she's no longer immortal. In his next scene, six months later, he stumbles home drunk and upset, giving the impression that he has spent the whole time drinking to numb his guilt, loneliness, and grief.
  • Andy is shown taking a lengthy drink straight from a vodka bottle, showing her disillusioned character at that stage in the movie.
  • Averted with Quynh, who is introduced pouring herself a glass of water. Given that she spent a large part of her life drowning, it's an interesting choice.
• Empty Piles of Clothing: There's a pile of children's shoes outside the building where the Sudanese schoolgirls are supposedly being held hostage. After surviving the subsequent ambush they admit that was a particularly good touch of Copley's.
• Experienced Protagonist: Every member of the team was already a warrior before becoming immortal, and they've had hundreds or thousands of years of combat experience since then.
• Evil Brit: Merrick is the main villain of the story. His goal is to unlock the secret to immortality and profit off of it. In the process, performing many painful and unethical experiments on immortals. He is even willing to stab them for proof of their healing factor.
• Eye Awaken: A variant; the first time Andy comes back to life, having died with her eyes open, is shown by her pupils contracting as she focuses on the ground in front of her.
• Face–Heel Turn: Booker betrays the team because he wants to die and hopes medical science will find a way.
• Fakeout Escape: Merrick sends the penthouse elevator down to the ground floor to make it look like he's running for it.
• Faking the Dead: As Andy is taking Nile out of Afghanistan, Nile correctly points out that she's now technically AWOL. By the end of the film, Copley has set up a plan that will "prove" she was killed in action.
• Family of Choice: The group of immortals take care of each other and acts as a substitution for the family they lost with the passage of time.
  • When Booker is checking in at the hotel in Morocco, the hotel clerk ask him (in French) what brings him to Marrakesh. Booker responds, "la famille" (family). He could just be lying to the clerk, or it could be an indication that he truly thinks of the other immortals as his family.
• Feeling Their Age: Andy and Booker, though for different reasons. Andy feels like nothing she's done has ever really made a difference, while Booker is consumed by guilt about living while his sons died.
• Firing One-Handed: Done an awful lot by the team, though with centuries to get used to it, their accuracy is more believable.
• Flashback: An extended one serves to flesh out Andy's backstory when the team fills Nile in on why she's so jaded.
• Flirting Under Fire: When Joe and Nicky get captured, they flirt between each other to keep the tension down, whether it's commenting on how nice their kidnapping plane is or joking about that time in Malta in the middle of a torturous experiment. When it comes to other people, however, they're more serious. Compare Joe joking with Nicky about getting a bedhead to him yelling at Booker in the same situation.
• The Fog of Ages: Andy is so old that she can't remember her own age, or what the members of her family looked like.
  • Even her "real" name, Andromache the Scythian, reflects this. She was already thousands of years old by the time the Scythians entered the historical record in the 8th century BC. The Scythian era is just the furthest back she can remember, and apparently when she met Quynh.
  • In the comics, it's stated that Andy is 6,732 years old. In behind the scenes materials for the movie, they just said that Andy estimates that she's around "six to seven thousand" years old - updating it because realistically, it would have been difficult for Andy to keep track of her exact age before formal record-keeping in the pre-historic era.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Quynh's existence is hinted at a couple of times before being properly revealed:
    • Nile's dream about the other immortals while she's in the infirmary includes a flash of someone screaming underwater.
    • When Nile asks Andy how many immortals there are, Andy replies, "Four." Nile and the audience assume Andy is including herself in the count, but the question was actually how many others there were—as in besides Andy and Nile.
  • Booker is found with his chest blown open and the others missing. Yet we know the people snatching them a) know he's immortal, and b) want every immortal in their custody so they'll have a monopoly. Why then would they leave Booker behind if it wasn't part of their plan?
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: You know that necklace that Andy always wears? A few very brief shots from the flashback sequence show that it originally belonged to Quynh.
• A Friend in Need: Nile abandons Andy and Booker just before they confront Copley because she wants to spend as much time with her family as she can before they realise she doesn't age. But when she discovers that Booker betrayed Andy, she immediately turns around to save her.
• Friendly Sniper: Nicky, the team's most empathetic and kind member, is also a highly-skilled sniper.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: By the end of the film, the crew consists of two women and two men.
• Giant Mook: Andy fights one near the end of the story, making his size and strength mean nothing until he tells her where Merrick is.
• God Guise: When Nile tries to still believe in God after discovering her immortality, Andy tells her that she was once worshiped as a god, and therefore doesn't believe there's any real ones.
• Good Samaritan: The drug store cashier who, without asking any questions or demanding anything, takes Andy to the back of the store to dress her shoulder wound.
• Gun And Sword: Most notably during Andy's fight scene in the church; but Nicky and Joe also carry their swords from the Crusades into battle along with more modern weapons.
• Happily Married: While Joe and Nicky are not stated to be literally married, their relationship has lasted for 900 years and they are still very much in love with each other.
• Healing Factor: An immortal will heal from any wound within seconds or minutes, depending on the severity. At least until they one day don't, at which point they can be killed just as easily as anyone else.
  Andy Nothing that lives lives forever. One day, our wounds just don't heal up anymore. We don't know when.
• Heel–Face Turn: Copley turns on Merrick when he makes it clear he's more interested in profiting from the immortals' secret than genuinely helping people with it (plus, his willingness to torture them for years if necessary), helping Nile to save the others.
• Hide Your Gays:
  • Averted with Joe and Nicky, who are shown embracing in their sleep, kissing and openly declaring their love for each other.
  • Downplayed with Andy and Quynh. The film never outright confirms that they were a couple^note although Joe telling Nile that "it was [Quynh] and Andy before me and Nicky" can be read as referring to his and Nicky's Official Couple status in addition to their immortality, but between Quynh serving as The Lost Lenore to Andy, them pledging to be with each other "until the end," and the fact that they were a couple in the graphic novel, it's pretty hard to read their relationship as platonic.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Nicky comments on this almost word for word to Copley after the latter's betrayal, and the fact Copley looks ashamed foreshadows his later heel face turn.

  Nicky: (as he is being led away in chains) We are usually a much better judge of character than this.

• Immortal Hero: The immortals intervene in different conflicts trying to do good and have had an immeasurable impact on the world. The villains are regular mortals trying to harness immortality for their own purposes.
• Immortality Hurts: The immortals always recover from their injuries, but they definitely still feel them.
  Booker: Just because we keep living doesn't mean we stop hurting.
• Immortal Immaturity: If anything, the movie is a deconstruction where centuries and millennia of experience have made the immortals more well adjusted, genuinely good people. Most notably, the homophobia that some bigoted soldiers show is called infantile by one of the immortals.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Zig-zagged. Booker had three sons, but it's unclear whether they were conceived before or after he became immortal. None of the other immortals have children, but it's not addressed if they can't, if they choose not to, or if it's just a side effect of the majority of them (Joe, Nicky, Andy, and Quynh) being in same-sex couples for most of their lives.
• In Medias Res: The film opens with a shot of Andy, Booker, Joe, and Nicky lying dead on the floor. It then cuts back to a day or so earlier, showing who they are and how they got there.
• Instant Sedation: How the bad guys instantly knock out their captured immortals with an epipen-like injector to their necks.
• It Works Better with Bullets: Booker pulls this on Andy when he betrays her handing her an empty pistol for a raid. It works, despite her age and experience-possibly because he used Joe's USP and not her usual SiG P226.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Merrick is introduced as the corporate jerk who got Copley to betray the team, but then he seemingly shows a moral conscience when he claims he only wants to study the immortals because they could help him cure all disease. As the story progresses, however, it becomes apparent that he's just an arrogant prick who only cares about the money and glory that such a cure would bring him and thinks nothing of torturing people to get what he wants.
• The Kindnapper: Andy just walks into a Coalition military base, knocks out Nile and drives off with her in a stolen Hummer. When she tries jumping out of the Hummer, Andy shoots her in the head as well.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After witnessing Andy wipe out most of their men, Keane and Copley decide to get clear of the church before she catches up to them.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: Joe and Nicky, soulmates whose love has only grown deeper over the centuries.
• Love Redeems: Implied with Joe and Nicky's backstory, as they met locked in battle on opposite sides of a violent holy war. Now, centuries later, they have fallen in love and completely transcended their old hatreds. This is more emphasized with Nicky, who directly states that "the love of my life was of the people I had been taught to hate."
• Lured into a Trap: The rescue mission of Sudanese schoolgirls was impossible to ignore for the heroes, but it was all a carefully-laid trap.
• Married to the Job: Played straight with Andy and Booker, who are both implied to be incredibly lonely, only having their work to distract them from immortality. Averted with Joe and Nicky, who have each other.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The mercs in the "Killing Room" scene, having just emptied at least a hundred rounds into four people, have this reaction when those same four people get up and begin to attack, quite angry about having had at least a hundred rounds emptied into them.
• Mook Horror Show: The fight at the church. Andy pretty much massacres multiple teams of soldiers, leaving Copley and Keane staring in horror at the camera footage of the dead. It's at that point that they decide to cut their losses and run for it.
• Noodle Incident: When you live forever you pick up a few stories.
  Nicky: You know, I was thinking about Malta.
  Joe: What time in Malta?
  Nicky: *looks at him*
  Joe: *laughing* Oh, that time in Malta.

  Joe: What are you thinking? Oslo '67?
  Andy: Nah. São Paolo '34.
  Nile: What happened in São Paolo in 1934?
  Andy: 1834.
• Not Wearing Tights: The team are basically superheroes, but they never wear costumes or call themselves by codenames.
• Official Couple: Joe and Nicky have been a couple for almost a millennium and are still very much in love.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Joe and Nicky, handcuffed and chained to the floor of a truck, still manage to kill their entire group of captors barehanded.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Keane and Copley, having abducted Joe and Nicky, have this moment when they realize exactly what a pissed off Andromache is capable of, and wisely decide to get the hell out before she finds them.
  • Nile has one directly after this, when she sees the twenty or so men Andy killed and realizes that one woman did that in less than five minutes.
  • Keane gets another moment of this when Nile shows up, and he realizes there's a fifth immortal nobody had counted on.
• The Older Immortal: Andy is much older than the rest of the immortals, though she won't (and probably can't) give her exact age.
• One-Hit Polykill: Nicky waits till a sentry walks behind another sentry (across his line of fire) and kills both with a single round from his bolt-action sniper rifle.
• One-Woman Army:
  • Andy goes up against several teams of heavily armed soldiers, and mows through them like grass.
  • Lampshaded when Andy tells Nicky that she commands an army. It just happens to be an army with only four soldiers in it.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The immortals only use their modern nicknames with very few exceptions. Andy introduces herself to Nile using her original name and Quynh screams it during her flashback, while Joe calls Nicky's original name in passing during one scene.
  • Andy's real name is Andromache the Scythian.^note Though Andy actually predates the Scythians by a couple thousand years
  • Joe's real name is Yusuf Al-Kaysani.^note "Joe" is a nickname for Joseph, the anglicized form of Yusuf.
  • Nicky's real name is Nicolo di Genova.
  • Booker's real name is Sebastien Lelivre.^note "Le livre" being French for "the book"
• Outliving One's Offspring: Booker outlived all three of his sons, and that fact still haunts him.
• Pants-Positive Safety: Another indication the immortals haven't received dedicated firearms training is their overuse of this trope, carrying their guns simply stuffed into the waistbands of their pants.
• Pistol-Whipping: When Copley stands up to Merrick for going beyond their agreement, he gets pistol-whipped in the back of the neck by a mook, instantly falling unconscious to the floor.
• Playing Possum:
  • Andy does this by shooting the pilot of the cargo plane she and Nile are on, after telling him in Russian to play dead. Andy and Nile use the same trick on Merrick during their fight later in the film, with Andy being the one who pretends to be dead.
  • Nile lets the guards at the tower shoot her, then kills them after they come up to search her body.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The reason for Quynh's And I Must Scream fate was changed from the comic because the original version (being accidentally washed overboard during a storm) would have been incredibly expensive to film, and it just wasn't worth spending that much money on a scene that would only make up perhaps ninety seconds of the film's runtime.
• Race Lift: Lykon and Copley are black, while they were Ambiguously Brown and white in the comic, respectively. Comic Andy was Ambiguously Brown but white in the film.
• Really 700 Years Old: Andy, Joe, Nicky, Booker, and Quynh. Andy is by far the oldest, so old that she claims she can't remember her age^note In the comics, she says she's 6,732, Joe and Nicky are each around 950 or so, while Booker is around 240. Quynh's age is unspecified, but she's the second-oldest and, based on her history with Andy, is presumably several thousand years old.
• Red Herring: When Merrick demands Copley capture these immortals, Copley points out that this would be rather difficult, but he may be able to get hold of one. This seems to refer to Nile, who has just proven immortal while serving with the US military in Afghanistan, so it wouldn't be strange for an ex-CIA agent to have found out about her. He's actually referring to Booker. When Nile turns up on Copley's doorstep, he doesn't even know who or what she is.
• Regretful Traitor: Booker truly regrets giving up the team, but he's so tired of living that he considers possibly dying an even trade.
• Reluctant Warrior: Nile takes a life for the first time after shooting an enemy combatant who was hiding in an Afghan village. She feels incredibly uncomfortable with killing and temporarily leaves the team because she can't bring herself to kill another person. Nile only changes her mind when she realizes that Andy is in legitimate danger because Booker betrayed her.
• Resurrective Immortality: If peppered with enough bullets or subjected to enough physical damage the immortals can temporarily "die", only to quickly heal and come back to life when enough of their bodies have repaired themselves.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Downplayed as they can't kill Booker for his betrayal, so he's ostracized from The Old Guard for one hundred years, making him effectively alone in the world. Copley can be killed, but instead they give him An Offer You Cannot Refuse; from now on he's to identify and cover up all traces of The Old Guard, and find them assignments so they can continue their work.
• Save This Person, Save the World: Andy's actions, as Copley discovered, have done this over and over again through history — her actions have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of seemingly inconsequential people who years down the road either performed a great service to humanity or had children or grandchildren who did the same. Andy, notably, is entirely unaware of this for most of the film, as her policy of avoiding repeat jobs or interacting long-term with non-immortals kept her from realizing what was going on.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After the church assault turns into a massacre as Andy obliterates the assault team, Copley tells the team leader it's time to go, and they waste no time legging it, either.
• Senseless Violins: A nylon instrument case is shown being carried about by various characters; it's eventually revealed to be holding Andy's double-bladed axe.
• Sequel Hook: Booker returns to his apartment to find Quynh waiting for him, having somehow escaped her imprisonment.
• Shared Dream: Whenever a new immortal suffers their first death, all of them dream about each other. Andy has sought others out, and Nicky lampshades that it used to take years before modern technology.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: Joe and Nicky. Befitting their respective Red Oni, Blue Oni natures, Joe is emphasized as a particularly good melee fighter (such as when he kills Keane, the security chief with his bare hands), while Nicky is the Cold Sniper of the group.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Nicky and Joe killed each other multiple times during the first crusade before falling in love.
• Slashed Throat: Nile dies for the first time after an enemy insurgent slashes her throat. Her squad-mates are shocked when they look at her neck and find that there's no trace of the wound.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Joe and Nicky are regarded as this by Booker, who bitterly notes that they could not possibly understand his grief and despair because they've found happiness with each other.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Had Andy not traded her pistol (which was unloaded by Booker before the raid) for the SMG she had given to her, Nile wouldn't have figured out Booker's treachery and gone back home to her family unaware of the danger Andy and the other immortals were in for Merrick's experimentation.
  • Copley and Merrick have no idea that Nile, a new immortal, has just come on the scene. Nile evades capture because she decides to go home instead of raiding Copley's house, meaning she is left free to rescue the others.
• Spoiler Cover: On the poster, Joe, Nile, and Nicky are grouped to one side while Booker is grouped with Copley on the other. This foreshadows that Booker has been working with Copley all along.
• Storming the Castle: During the climax, Nile breaks into Merrick's tower to rescue the others, and then together they fight their way to his penthouse to finish him off.
• String Theory: Copley’s conspiracy wall tracking Andy’s historical influence.
• Survivor Guilt: Booker is tormented by the memory of his sons dying, while Andy was separated from the only other immortal she knew at that time, and considers it a failure even though she spent decades trying to find the other woman.
• Take That!:
  • In-Universe: As Nile asks a group of Afghan women about the location of a wanted bombmaker, one of them replies that "to use woman as shields is to be no man at all"... immediately before discreetly pointing out said not-a-man-at-all's hiding place.
  • Merrick is an obvious take on Martin Shkreli, and by extension all other immoral, predatory pharmaceutical executives of whom he's just the most famous.
• Technology Marches On: In-Universe. In centuries past, it was easier for the team to fly below the radar. The twenty-first century, however, has led to an increase in the ubiquity of modern surveillance systems and record-keeping, not to mention smartphones. Andy at one point offers to take a photo of a group of vacationers so she can delete the picture one of them just took which had her in the background. On the plus side, it takes the immortals about thirty seconds to piece together who Nile is and where she has awakened from their vision just by how much they know of current geo-politics and cultures when they previously needed years to find each other.
• Technician/Performer Team-Up: Andy is the performer, banking on her immortality and years of combat with acrobatics and lots of violence, while Nile is the technician who's only just recently gained immortality and was trained more to make combat encounters quick and efficient with headshots. They both are a formidable duo in combat and prove that creativity and efficiency combine well when Andy comes up with the out-of-the-box idea to get Nile to pretend to shoot her to distract Merrick when he's holding a gun to a de-immortalized Andy. They pull it off without Andy saying anything else.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Joe is not happy that Booker is helping them escape Merrick, but rightly stifles his anger when Andy points out there will be time for recriminations after they're safe.
• They Would Cut You Up: The basic plot of the film.
• Time Skip: A small one. The final scene takes place six months into Booker's century-long punishment of isolation and reveals that at some point, Quynh escaped her imprisonment at the bottom of the ocean.
• Throw-Away Guns: The team picks up and discard weapons frequently during the final battle. Justified in that they didn't have any weapons to start and are using weapons picked up from the security guards they've killed.
• Undying Warrior: The film, as with the original comic, features the adventures of a gang of immortal mercenaries drawn from various eras of history - including ancient Scythia, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, and the 21st century conflicts in the Middle East. All of the immortals possess agelessness and Resurrective Immortality - with a twist: after an indeterminate period of time, they will lose their immortality and die permanently... and given their violent lifestyles, they rarely get any advance warning.
• Villain Has a Point: A particularly scary one. Merrick is quick to realize that Andy no longer being immortal doesn't make her worthless for his research, it makes her more valuable. Something changed in her recently that removed her Healing Factor, figuring out what that is, what the difference between her and the other immortals and them and ordinary humans are is the most important piece of the puzzle.
• Villainous Breakdown: With his forces destroyed, Merrick degenerates into ranting at Andy and trying to kill her, in spite of her possible use to him.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Copley's wife died of amytrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease). He thought that if the team's abilities could be studied and replicated, it might save other people in the future. Merrick's attitude of "locking them up for years if that's what it takes" is a bridge too far for him, and he not only helps Nile break them out, but agrees to help them stay hidden and find more jobs in the future.
• We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: Subverted, as part of the theme of technology reshaping the world. Copley initially tries to sell Merrick on the team's immortality with a video of them getting back up and killing all their attackers after being gunned down. Merrick derides it as "a two million dollar snuff film" and wants physical proof.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Dr. Kozak gets punched out by Nile and is never seen or heard from again, even though she presumably survived the team's escape, knows that they're immortal, and has tissue samples and data collected from them.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Booker never got over losing his mortal sons and Andy becomes jaded from what she sees as the world going down the drain, assuming their actions never made a difference. Copley's conspiracy wall finally shows her how wrong she is, tracking how the lives they saved in turn improved others.
• World's Best Warrior: Andy, who has "forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn".
• You Can't Go Home Again: Nile tries to defy this upon learning she's an immortal. One of the reasons she temporarily left the team when they started their raid at Copley's house, besides her reluctance to kill. She eventually comes to term with this when Copley helped in proving that she "died in action".

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