The Old Guard (2020)

I thought this was better than Extraction. Extraction had better action scenes but there really was no story at all, this one has worse action scenes (quick cut shit to hide actors who move slow) but a pretty interesting world building and story. It drags a little in the middle but otherwise I felt myself engaged the whole time. The bad guy is pretty lame but the movie smartly focuses mostly on just the group of 4+1.

Definitely worth a watch for anyone who is a fan of Highlander or Underworld, had similar vibe to those movies.

I thought this was alright. I wish we got more of what is going on with these people, but it's apparent they are shooting for a trilogy or something.

i was interested in seeing this, just because there's nothing else going on... but then i saw charlize was in it and... well i just have no attention span for her anymore. it was the same thing with tom cruise when he went publicly insane, but that man has worked HARD to win me back over the years. charlize still acts like we owe her something.

7.5, needs more rgb but the ambush badassery scene was legit.

The biggest thing that bugged me was:

I liked it. The coda at the end was predictable but still nice. It's a cool spin on the Highlander schtick and who doesn't like some good old fashioned immortals slaying a metric fuckton of badguys.

re: body armor

spronk said:

re: body armor

Spoiler

i saw it as they view immortality as a curse, like vampires. the guy who betrayed them WANTS to die and assume the others feel the same, that living is a nightmare they want to escape. Pretty common theme in vampire movies. So while they may not shoot themselves over and over to get the death counter to 9999, dying while in a "good cause" seems like maybe something they have internalized as God's only way of releasing them from a living hell? To escape this prison you must rack up good deeds kinda thing.

You do have to sorta hand wave away why they didn't meticulously plan out escape strats, C4 bomb vests so if anyone captures them etc they can suicide out and regrow, etc but also I'd say while they feared being captured in the "dark ages" due to accusations of witchcraft, probably in modern times they weren't really thinking too hard about being captured for scientific experimentation. That was sort of a neat little spin on the genre, I wish they had done the bad guy a bit better though.

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Having Dudley Dursley as the irredeemable Martin Shkreli character was a nice touch as his face is instantly punchable.

Qhue said:

Having Dudley Dursley as the irredeemable Martin Shkreli character was a nice touch as his face is instantly punchable.

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holy shit that dude lost weight

Harshaw said:

The biggest thing that bugged me was:

Spoiler

Ok, so your "immortal", but you know that one day it just may end. So why the fuck are you not wearing fucking bulletproof vests? I mean wouldn't you still take the precautions? Also the fact that you are all afraid of being captured and you know you are vulnerable after being taken out.

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The only thing I do not like about movies like this are the rules, if not explained out.

In Highlander(As this has been compared to), an Immortal could die. Separate the head and the game was over. This movie does not go into that detail but implies that they are truly immortal. So lets go with that a moment.

If you burned them alive, as apparently was the case for the witch trials, they regrow all the tissue back. Now a person could argue that the villagers chose not to burn them all the way down to the bones but I am pretty sure they would have. So if all that remains are the bones, how do you regenerate? Do the bones crawl back together to form the body? I am pretty sure the villagers would have caught on to that and forced them to remain separated. Do each of the bones grow a new body? This premise was wonderfully joked about in Deadpool.

The movie was fine but it did a poor job of explaining how the immortals were immortal. Yes they could regenerate from death but could they regenerate from all death? I do not even want to consider how they come back from an atomic explosion. Now I am guessing that a magical force regenerates the whole, regardless of separation. If not, then the " We cannot die and my life sucks because of it" aspect of the movie was pointless. They could have died if they had wanted to.

I bring this all up because of the strapped explosives comment. If they are truly force regenerated, then becoming trapped would be the only fear they would have. It would also be very easy to do. Poison of all kinds effect them. Knock them out and bury them in a ceramic structure 500 feet below the ground and they are removed from the equation for as long as the structure survives. The woman coming back from the sea makes perfect sense if that was salt water. The casing would have deteriorated enough in that period of times for her to get out. I do have to admit that constantly drowning and then reemerging only to drown again, is quite the hell. I wonder how the brain would have tried to adapt to that situation?