#the old guard meta

[scimitar-and-longsword]

I love your headcanons. What's your favorite one about Nicky ? And/or your favorite character trait of him?

Oh my goodness, thank you!

Nicky Nicky Nicky 💕💕💕

My FAVORITE??? That's a tall order cause there are so many things I love about him. Luca did such a stellar job of taking this character who doesn't have as much screentime as some of the other characters and bringing him to life in the most subtle ways. (I have an entire meta about subtle face acting from him and Marwan lol which side note, is flagged for sexual content, and I was sitting here reading it like "what why?? This is just about facial expressions?" And then I got halfway through and went "oop- that'll do it 😅")

I wrote a meta about this back in the old days, but I think about it every time I rewatch the movie so I'm saying it again: I love that Nicky is fiercely physical with his love.

We certainly get to see Joe be more vocal about is love, (and it's a violent movie they all are physical lol) but every bit of Nicky's physicality and fight chreo is about protecting people.

He is constantly protecting those around him with his body (and to be fair, they all do this at some point. Perks of being immortal is that you can use your body as a shield) but Nicky just KEEPS doing it.

There's a subtle moment after Joe gets stabbed by Merrick where TO ME it looks like he's trying to get between Joe and Merrick. The guy holding back Nicky is like GRIPPING his shoulder.

Nicky is constantly going from the front of the group to the rear and back again. Like he needs to be the first line of defense against wherever the most unknowns are.

He does it when they first exit the lab they were being held in. He's second out of the door, following Nile's lead, but then immediately covers the rear (after executing a completely unnecessary slide move that you can only see in behind the scenes footage and always makes me laugh.) to then turn around and cover everyone else as they exit.

Then again when he takes the bullet for Andy, he's at the rear of the group with Joe, takes the bullet, and then runs through the ENTIRE group, while healing from said bullet, past the door they are going to go into (and presumably check that it's clear) to cover the other end of the hall. And look at that he's at the rear of the group again... Over the course of not even half a minute. Ping pong ball Nicky over here.

When Joe and Nicky are fighting Keane after the explosion Nicky is fucking reckless with how he fights, and mostly cause Joe is kind of getting his ass kicked. 😅 He throws himself onto Keane not once but twice! Both times when Joe is about to get absolutely bodied.

In a similar fashion, Nicky often acts like a battering ram, taking people down for Joe to take out just after him. (If you go back up to that behind the scenes gif of Nicky sliding you can see he does this there too. Shoots a guy in the knee who Joe then shoots in the head.)

Idk if this was at all coherent because I'm writing this on my phone while watching a Tinkerbell movie with my daughter 😂 so I'm sure I'm missing so many more examples of it. But Nicky is often quiet with his words, but he is not quite with his actions and I love that about him!!

#my stuff #my gifs #my metas #ask #anon #the old guard #nicky #the old guard meta #answer

[artsy-waffle19]

One thing I love so much about "The old guard" is that in comparison to other action movies I've seen so far, there's characters that have actual personalities that are vital to the plot and why the characters are doing what they're doing.

major "The old guard" spoilers if you haven't watched it yet pls do. It's on Netflix n a second part is supposed to come out soon (it's already made but there's no release date yet but stiiill)

Idk if anyone noticed that yet and correct me if I'm wrong but I noticed that n needed to share because especially for the older group of immortals it pecomes so clear why they keep going (taking Nile out here because the entire movie is just about her, getting used to it and she isn't in the same situation as the others yet).

But Andy is doing everything she's doing because she feels responsible. Her entire struggle in the beginning is, that she feels like her work isn't doing any good. She wants to stop because the "projects" she works on don't seem to work out so obviously she's discoiraged but as soon as anyone in the group is in danger she immediately jumps to being the leader of the group again ("I will get them back whatever it takes" , "I always go first").

Nicky is the optimistic one of the group and believes that everything happens for a reason, which he keeps reminding everyone of as encouragement. He keeps doing what he's doing as long as he has faith that there is a reason, even if he doesn't know it. I think for him it's the most obvious because it's part of most of his dialogues with the rest of the group "everything happens for a reason boss", "it's like it was meant to be [....] like fate", and it also shows in a lot of his other scenes even if he doesn't outright say it (like the scene in the lab when he beings up going to Malta even though they're captured right now, once again showing how he's optimistic and believes that things will eventually work out).

Joe does everything he does for the principle. This is shown in smaller ways but i really like how they kept subtly putting it into his actions. Throughout the movie he mainly seems chronically pissed off, however we gotta consider that the movie shows a time frame where people are mainly doing things that harm him or the people he cares about in some way, which he obviously deems as wrong so getting back at them is just all about the principle. There's no arguing or reasoning with him because he is set in what he believes in and will fight for justice even about the little things. We can especially see that later in the movie in the final fight in the lab. This shows especially in the line "you shot Nicky...you shouldn't have done that" followed by him, killing the guy he just spoke to, like- Nicky is alive and well, the guy's immortal there was never even a slight risk of him dying but it's the principle. Also that he wants to leave Booker in the lab for betraying them, his last line in the movie of "she's not asking", which basically translates to 'you fucked up so now you owe us, deal with it' or just the entirety of the van scene. Obviously the whole "what is he? your boyfriend?" was just supposed to be some homophobic joke but, once again he asked so he's getting an answer. It's just the principle.

And Booker tries to do all he does for the people he loves, yet all the people he loved are dead and as we can see in his dialogue with Joe ("You and Nicky always had each other.......") and the first scene of all of them interacting, in which he doesn't interact with the group much or hug any of them, plus the fact that he's the youngest out of all of them, he doesn't seem to see himself as part of the group. He can't really find a reason for anything he's doing like the others do because while Andy will always feel responsible for the people around her, Nicky will most likely never lose his faith and Joe will always find something to be pissed off about, Bookers children are dead and any people he gets attached to will eventually die, which therefore disqualifies them as a safe and constant source of motivation. And the fact that he is aware of that but cannot find another reason to live for makes all of his actions so much more understandable and also really heartbreaking. To him his immortality isn't about responsibility, reason or justice it's just about hurting "just because we keep living, doesn't mean we stop hurting". So obviously he'd want to stop it.

I just rewatched it and it's so nice to see the dialogue and the character dynamics and really get the characters actions, which makes the plot like 10 times better. Generally I just really love this movie and I need Netflix to release the second one NOW because that cliffhanger was atrocious.

#please tell me this fandom isn't dead yet #i know it's been years but i believe in us #this is a movie about immortals the fandom cannot die after 3 yrs #the old guard netflix #the old guard #the old guard andy #the old guard nicky #the old guard joe #the old guard booker #meta #the old guard meta #long post

[shire-baird]

oh. OH IVE HAD A THOUGHT

So I've been thinking about immortality, particularly the different attitudes that Hob and the Old Guard have towards it. (Especially Booker)

And then I remember that quote that kind of goes, "Ist it better to have loved and lost, or have never loved at all?"

And that line was kinda rotating in my mind with Booker and Hob. And then I realized what the difference between them is.

They have both loved, and both lost. But Hob focuses on the loved, and Booker focuses on the lost.

#this probably isnt new but i feel like ive cracked the code #i have to find a way to work this into the hob meets the old guard crossover fic i started to outline yesterday #the sandman #hob gadling #the old guard #booker #sebastien le livre #the sandman meta #the old guard meta

[goldheartedsky]

on andromache and sébastien....

atonement (2007) — dir. joe wright // 'wild geese' — mary oliver // 'the kiss' (1987) — edvard munch // 'to the desert' — benjamin alire sáenz // 'the eternal idol' — auguste rodin // '& forgive us our trespasses' — sinéad morrissey // the old guard (2020) — dir. gina prince-bythewood

#the old guard #andy x booker #web weaving #the old guard meta #the third poem haunts me in ways i can't quite process and it was the first thing I had to put in here

[ice-and-starlight]

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Old Guard meta lately (so obsessed, go watch that movie if you haven’t already, it’s so good), and I’ve seen a lot of good stuff re Booker and his relationships with everyone else, but there’s something I just haven’t see that keeps bugging me, and it ties into some of the, uh... woobification of Booker that gives me seriously creepy vibes.

Don’t get me wrong, I adore Booker and his storyline, it’s one of the best, most genuine betrayal storylines I’ve ever seen, with the foreshadowing and the psychology of the character so flawlessly set up that it didn’t come as a shock even when the twist totally still got me. (I remember reading in a meta for a completely different fandom that ‘twists are supposed to make you go ‘oh shit it all makes sense now!’ not ‘wtf where did that come from???’‘ and that’s what the Old Guard did so right here.) To set up a story where we, the audience, can still sympathise with the betrayer even in the moment he is actively betraying his family? -fans self- I aspire to this level of storytelling, truly.

But! Let me talk about that foreshadowing and psychology a moment. Because I’ve seen meta about the Don Quixote book, and I don’t think I need to explain why the multiple defensive ‘I don’t know’s after Joe and Nicky get taken are a little red flag, but here’s the thing that never gets talked about re foreshadowing Booker’s betrayal.

His backstory.

Oh, I don’t mean how his backstory explains why he’s terminally depressed, lots of people have dipped into that, Once you know what he’s planning, it’s very easy to see how he got there, how so much loss drove him to foolish, desperate acts in an attempt to make the pain stop. I don’t think I need to go into the details of what losing a child (even an adult child) does to someone.

No, I’m talking about the fact that Booker’s son didn’t trust him.

It’s written into his backstory, guys.

I will be the first to admit that my standards for parents in fiction are, uh, rather high, so maybe it didn’t look like a red flag to most people, but I watched that flashback scene, and more than just feeling the tragedy of Booker’s side, I felt a genuine little thread of horror at his son’s side of the story.

Now... that sort of severely extreme situation is hard to truly empathise with, but just try, for a moment, to imagine that you have a terminal diagnosis. You’re in pain and you know you’re dying. And your dad happens to be an immortal, who heals from greivous wounds and, presumably, doesn’t really get sick. It’s not exactly a stretch to imagine longing for that for yourself, right? Obviously. Anyone would. But... I try to imagine my dad, sitting at my bedside, while I’m dying, saying ‘I wish I could give it to you, but I can’t’, and... not believing him?

Honestly, I don’t believe that could happen unless there were already cracks in that foundation. Unless there was already some part of that man that whispered doubt in the dark recesses of his psyche.

I’m not saying that Booker’s son was right, not at all. The movie does show us that Booker is willing to sacrifice for the people he loves, but the movie also clearly shows us that he is not above making decisions for other people, regardless of their feelings on the matter. He’s also very good at keeping things to himself and/or not really trusting other people with them. (If he was so sure Andy wanted to die just like he did, why didn’t he tell her about his plan?)

My point, I guess, is that, yes, Booker’s backstory is tragic, it’s a horrible situation, but he’s not entirely innocent in it, either. He is one half of the equation that produced a relationship where a son felt he could not count on his dad when he was dying. I’m not even saying it was Booker’s fault that it was like that, but it was, at least in some part, his responsibility, as a father, to make sure his son knew he could count on him. And somewhere, somehow, he failed. And that’s not some sort of condemnation of him, because we’re all human and we’re not perfect, but that still doesn’t absolve him of his responsibility.

Booker tells that story like his experience is universal. Like it couldn’t happen any other way, and that’s just not true. It may be more likely in this fucked up world than anyone likes to think about, because no one can really escape life unscathed, but it’s not a guarantee that it will always be like that.

(PS: And also, while I adore the ‘found family’ trope that is executed so well in this movie, I will admit that the ‘they’ll die long before you do so there’s no point in making a connection at all’ bit that never really got rebuffed (the ‘don’t bother saving them it’s pointless’ did get rebuffed, and that was great, but not the more personal aspect) and in fact got subtly reinforced by Nile’s decision to cut ties with her family really bothers me.

Like, geez, hamster owners, better just abandon those little guys right now, they’re going to die way before you so better not get all attached. Advocate for their safety but don’t actually bond with them and love them and enjoy their company, because it’ll only end in misery. /sarcasm

What nonsense.)

#The Old Guard #Sebastian le Livre #(did I spell that right?) #meta #The Old Guard meta #Booker meta #should I tag this as #Booker critical #just in case? #idk it just gave me creepy vibes when I watched it #and on my second watch-through #I was just like 'omg they literally spelled it out for us' #Booker: my own family didn't trust me =( #Also Booker: -betrays his family- #hmm... #I wonder... if there isn't... a connection... here? #maybe?

[mekana47]

The Old Guard with Muppets

The Muppet Christmas Carol got me thinking about what would be the best way to combine The Old Guard with Muppets. Here’s what I’ve come up with, but I’d love to know how you would do it.

Only one human: If I could only have one human on the cast (as the game usually goes), I want it to be Andy. Her exhaustion, her weariness with the world, all of her efforts to stay hidden, the very idea that the world evolved from human-centric to Muppet-centric during her lifespan and she’s the last human left witnessing what the world has become-- all of it is funnier when she’s towering over almost everyone else. Also, think about the church fight scene with Muppets flying across the sanctuary.

A mix of Muppets and humans: If I could have more than one human actor (like most Muppet movies do), I want the team to all be Muppets and everyone else to be human. The comedic irony of them blending in with humans so long. Merrick pontificating to the Muppets strapped down while Kozak tries to figure out why Muppets can’t die. Booker wanting to be human again. The fight scenes! The resurrections. The only thing I can’t decide is if Nile has been a Muppet all her life and never realized it or if she’s played by a human actress right up until her first death and then she resurrects as a Muppet. If the latter, Andy would have to become human at some point, which would ruin the reveal to the audience even if the characters don’t notice.

Clearly, I’ve been overthinking this, and I want you all to overthink it too.

#the old guard #the old guard meta #The Muppets

[paigian]

in the old guard, immortality = statelessness. to become immortal is to become a permanent non-citizen, to never be able to return home the same way.

#the old guard #immortality #meta #sometimes i think abt the fact that greg rucka is jewish and how this has translated into his ideas about immortals #the addition of Yitzhak in the TtT too

[youssefguedira]

actually i've decided i'm obsessed with joe's what are you gonna do kill me line. marwan kenzari plays that one 100% seriously which is in line with how he does the rest of the scene (perfect btw 100/10 we've talked about that that's not the point here) and i tend to overlook it because of that but in retrospect funniest possible thing to say to the guys who have kidnapped you for your immortality. what ARE they gonna do. kill him?

#neon has thoughts #saw a gifset. you know how it is #the old guard #joe 'faster than the elevator' al-kaysani WOULD say that #in context and with the way mr kenzari delivers it it reads a lot like he's so concerned over whether nicky is all good that he just kinda #snaps it at them. which very much works. but the line itself. funny as hell #and THAT'S reason 437 why mr kenzari should have an award for this scene and does in my heart with different delivery it would feel like a #marvel-esque quip but in the context it feels more serious and crucially Not Unbelievable #which is the key to the van scene imo. wrote a whole little meta about it once. but that's not important right now

[mirrorofliterature]

there's something very amatonormative about the way booker sees the world

he tells nicky and joe that they had always had each other, whilst andy and booker only had themselves and their grief and that's uncharitable and an amatonormative way of looking at the world.

yes, nicky and joe are in a long-term romantic and sexual relationship that is very solid, but that doesn't negate like... their platonic relationships?

when booker says that, it is so damn self-absorbed and naive and amatonormative

does he not realise that nicky and joe have always been with him too? that nicky and joe lost quynh too? sure, andy lost her lover but look at nicky and joe when they tell nile about quynh - they loved her and her loss deeply fucked them up.

booker's betrayal is so, so selfish and amatonormative. and sure he had his reasons - grief, alcoholism, depression - but those are not excuses, but explanations. I'm on the side of 'booker is a character and what he did was understandable and he clearly needs therapy' but 'holy SHIT let nicky and joe feel BETRAYED because they were and shouldn't have to moderate their reaction to protect ickle booker' - like the amount of work booker needs to put in for a proper reconciliation is astronomical.

anyway I digress. by saying 'you always had each other', booker is being an amatonormative little shit who downplays both nicky and joe's platonic relationships, I love and care for the other immortals, including him, but also that they have suffered loss too - their families, and how their first meeting wasn't exactly serendipitous.

anyway! booker's framing of nicky and joe is deeply fucked up, stemming from amatonormativity and booker's worldview of competing grief. like booker.... grief sucks but it's not a competition, y'know?

anyway! this is a Reading TM of booker's worldview vis a via nicky and joe that I've felt strongly about because booker just like. is so self-absorbed in his grief that he cannot recognise and appreciate what he has, nor can he recognise that nicky and joe's lives haven't been sunshine and rainbows because they're in a romantic relationship.

like bro. they love you. go to therapy.

#the old guard #meta #booker #anti booker #well more like #booker critical #but I like to err on the side of caution #amatonormativity #kaysanova #nicolo di genova #yusuf al kaysani #like they lost their families and quynh too y'know there's no monopoly on grief

[normal-thoughts-official]

Today's flavor of insanity is brought to you by the fact that we only get ONE scene where Joe and Nicky are alone in a room. And it's in a fucking lab where they're being held hostage and Nicky was being tortured in it literally less than 5 minutes ago. And yet all it takes is for Joe to say ONE line (one fucking line. Hell, it's one word) and Nicky laughs unabashed for the ONLY time in the entire movie. He laughs unabashed and he even snorts and he looks more relaxed and open than at any other point, including the bet. Because it's just him and Joe and when it's just him and Joe he can allow himself to let every guard down, which he doesn't do even when he sleeps because he sleeps with a gun, but somehow, in the middle of the enemy's lair, after being tortured, Nicky can allow himself to relax enough to ugly laugh. Because it's just him and Joe and as long as it's just him and Joe he doesn't have to keep himself in check

#i hate them and i hate this movie. chewing drywall like bubblegum #tog #the old guard #nicolò di genova #joenicky #kaysanova #nicolo di genova #semi meta #ill make this a tag i think

[avelera]

OFMD has completely ruined me for Hollywood Hot people in tv and film. I’m just so tired of it. I’m tired of everyone having “perfect” hair and “perfect” abs and fuckin’ “perfect” complexions without freckles or or unique characteristics of any kind because they need to fit some idealized fucked up sanded down boring ass producer’s vision of what “attractive” means to the largest possible audience and everyone’s gotta be “cool” but in that YA hero way where no one is cool because they’re not actually a real person they’re all just flashy plastic plot devices without rough edges or uncomfortable realism of any kind

I want to see people with more than zero percent body fat (Olu, Wee John, hell, Stede and Ed too and they’re the romantic leads!), men who are short (Izzy) and women who are tall and commanding (Spanish Jackie), or people with freckles and scars and not perfect teeth, people who have lisps that aren’t just being mocked for it (Black Pete), or who have a disability and it isn’t a huge misery porn plot device, and people who are “traditionally” hot (Jim) dressing for comfort and realism instead of to show off their assets for the titillation of the audience.

And I don’t mean this in a puritanical way like that this means no one should ever be sexualized. I also want to see normal looking people fuck and go shirtless and swim naked in the ocean and have partners who look at them like they’re the hottest person on earth because they are, who are shown to the audience as hot too, not because they look like a model but because even people who aren’t models are hot and you don’t need to starve and dehydrate people to death to make them hot, quite the opposite, if you’re not a focus group-driven ghoul.

So thanks, OFMD, you’ve officially set my standards way too high for just about everything.

#weirdly the Old Guard photos set this off because they DO look normal even though they’re all hot people #they’re dressed normal not just to Be Sexy and I realized I have a Type and OFMD made me realize it #our flag means death #ofmd meta

[scimitar-and-longsword]

Hey hope you're well :) Currently at the airport to Italy and then later this week Greece and I'm wondering what your headcanons are about Nicky and Joe when flying :) like who's there three hours early and who arrives ten minutes before take off? xD

Oh my goodness, have so much fun in Italy and Greece! I'm so jealous!

Ok this is such a fun question.

Joe is definitely the early one and Nicky is very lackadaisical about getting to the flight on time. "Yusuf, you need to calm down, we're never late."

I think Nicky falls asleep right away on long flights and Joe can't sleep for the life of him on planes. It's so hard for him to sleep on planes that he gets a little frustrated sitting next to Nicky who sleeps through everything.

Nicky tries so hard to stay awake because he knows Joe gets a little nervous on long flights, but something about the white noise lulls Nicky to sleep every time. Joe doesn't blame Nicky, he just wishes he could sleep through it as easily.

Nicky is very good at planning for this though. He always makes sure they have books and charges phones with movies downloaded. He's always pointing out the in flight movies and snack selection to Joe. So when he does inevitably fall asleep Joe has lots to focus on. "There's a TV Joe!"

I think when the others are there Nicky sits with Andy and they both peacefully sleep, while Nile and Joe are up trying to distract each other talking about art.

Booker sits by himself because he somehow keeps Andy and Nicky awake by talking too much. And freaks Joe and Nile out more by talking about all the things that could go wrong with the plane... Oh Booker.

Once they land Nicky does get a bit more anxious about losing luggage. Joe is just so relieved to be off the plane he doesn't even care. "Nicky, we only had two bags. It's fine, the Uber will be here in 5 mins." "No Joe, I'm sure we had 3 bags!" (They only had 2)

#oh my god its been so long since ive done a #the old guard meta #feels good to be back lol #meta #the old guard #joenicky #joe #nicky #andy #nile #booker #Joe may or may not be based on my own experience lol #im an extremely anxious flier #and my traitor of a partner always falls asleep lol #ask #anon

[astrabear]

a lot of fans didn't like the second season of Good Omens and some of them came up with unhinged fan theories about it

a lot of fans didn't like the second season of Our Flag Means Death and some of them came up with spectacularly unhinged fan theories about it

fandom history johnlock blah blah blah

the Old Guard sequel will, supposedly, be released at some point, and early signs are not great

And so I ask you:

If the second Old Guard movie ends up sucking, or just being a huge fucking letdown, will we let it slide, or will we take our place among the lunatic fandoms of legend? Surely TOG fans are creative enough, and batshit enough, to argue about something more outlandish than racism and misogyny.

It's not really something we can plan in advance, because it will all depend on the specific details of how the movie disappoints us. But we can at least start considering it. Start telling yourself now: Greg Rucka is a mad genius playing 5-dimesional chess. Anything that seems out of character or not in keeping with the themes you liked from the first movie is actually a clever stratagem in support of your favorite headcanon. The second movie is only a setup for the third movie anyway. It all makes sense, as evidenced by the fact that it requires an essay of at least 10,000 words to explain it.

Start working those conspiracy muscles now! Strengthen your legs so you can leap to the wildest possible conclusions! We can do this. I believe in us.

#the old guard #2o2g #the old guard 2 #fandom #fandom meta

[goldheartedsky]

Man, when you realize that Booker was likely sent to serve out his first sentence in one of the prison ships at Toulon, it makes a hell of a lot of sense why he'd choose going to the war vs going back

#the old guard #the old guard meta #sebastien le livre #homeboy said 'i will not go back to that hellhole. i would rather freeze to death' #and honestly i cannot blame him #someday ill write a fic about this

[max-nolastname]

when the old guard was like “heres a group of functionally immortal warriors, hundreds, thousands of years old” and then it was like “btw, they can die anytime, still! they will always bounce back until one day, seemingly at random, they dont” and then it was like “what if you came into your immortal life alongside another? they are your partner in every way you dont know immortal life without them but you understand that one day you might just have go on for another thousand years without them” and then it was like “what if an immortal was imprisoned in an environment where they die every minute again and again for hundreds of years with no relief” and then it was like “what if an immortal had severe depression” 

#the old guard #2old2guard #tog #i watched tog 7 times in one month #u guys are extremely lucky i didnt start up this tumblr during that time period #the incoherent meta posts i would have been chugging out daily would have been insane #i have been rattling andy quynh joe nicky booker nile in my silly little head for over a year #theyre... they are a lot #nile came into the scene and was like wow you guys are a lot #also some of the fanfics in this fandom are insane bonkers #like wow you really broke down the human condition in a 100k+ fanfic about a youngold depressed french man opening a bakery

[nevermindirah]

Who talks to who, for how long and about what, in The Old Guard (2020) dir. Gina Prince Bythewood?

I got curious and so I watched the movie taking a lot of timestamp notes. way back three and a half years ago now, I watched this movie for the first time bc I like gritty action movies, and it's a really good one of those. I'm still obsessed with it all this time later because it's full to the brim with well-drawn characters who have compelling relationships with each other, and boy howdy does the data show it.

I was especially curious about who spends how much time alone together on screen, so I coded all the scenes with that in mind, and I found some really interesting patterns in the breakdown of scenes where just two characters talk, where one character is the sole focus, and when three characters talk.

the winners of course are Nile and Andy, our dual protagonists, who spend 10% of the movie's total runtime alone together. they also spend a lot of time with our dual friendly antagonists, Booker and Copley. scenes featuring combinations of just these four characters make up 40% of the total runtime.

Joe and Nicky show up less in this analysis because they're side characters who mostly appear in group scenes, but wow are they richly drawn side characters. they're key players in all but two scenes where four or more named characters talk.

read on for many numbers and much analysis of what it all means!

Andy Nile 0:12:20 Nile Booker 0:06:00 Andy Booker Copley 0:05:22 Andy Booker 0:05:01 Andy Nile Booker 0:04:56 Nile Copley 0:04:18 Nile alone 0:04:07 Andy alone 0:03:31

Andy Celeste 0:02:49 Merrick Copley 0:02:41 Joe Nicky 0:02:24 Nile Dizzy Jay 0:01:33 Andy Quynh 0:01:31 Andy Nile Merrick 0:00:52 Booker alone 0:00:32 Copley alone 0:00:28 Nicky Kozak 0:00:27 Booker Quynh 0:00:21 Copley Keane 0:00:09

(the spreadsheet, if anyone's interested in digging deeper with me)

of the 12 min that our main characters are alone together on screen, almost fully half is super duper antagonistic:

4:26 is the kidnapping sequence

1:29 is their conversation outside after Nile's nightmare featuring the iconic "me and those three men in there will keep you safe" "like Quynh?"

and 7 seconds is Nile glaring daggers at Andy after walking over all those bodies in the church

the other half breaks down like this:

2:14 is them connecting over their mortal families — where Andy makes Nile give her phone back at the end

1:45 is Nile telling Andy she's not doing this, that she's going back to her family — Andy pushes with "we'd do the same for you" but then relents and gives Nile the car

50 seconds of them gearing up for the last segment of the fight — Nile tries to get Andy to wear a bulletproof vest, she jokes around with "is this gonna be like the last signal?" — it's operations-focused but there's a real warmth between them by this point in the movie (this scene starts at 1:41:45, just 13 min before the credits roll)

and 1:29 of Andy looking at Nile like she hung the moon (which, extremely valid and relatable!) and Nile saying that the time Andy's got left "you're gonna spend it with us"

Nile has an uninterrupted 4:18 sequence with Copley that speed runs the same general shape of her arc with Andy, hella antagonistic to teamwork, though the latter here is more of a professional camaraderie than the real warmth we see Nile develop for Andy.

in this context Nile's arc with Booker is remarkably different. their first scene alone together is 1:11 in total, intercut with Andy killing mercs elsewhere in the church, and it's sort of their only scene with friction between them. Booker keeps telling Nile to wait for the signal without explaining what that means, annoyingly continuing Andy's grand tradition of not fucking answering Nile's reasonable questions, ugh. though another way of framing this is of course that he's too busy packing her a change of clothes while showing off his tits for her. as I noted in a previous meta, the end of this sequence is the one time Booker lies to Nile (claiming he doesn't know who the mercs are when he has at least a basic idea, though we don't know for sure whether Copley involved him in this specific plan).

after this Nile and Booker have two more scenes alone together and they're both extended conversations: 3:14 for their conversation alone in the cave after Andy leaves, and 1:18 when Nile joins Booker on the balcony outside the bar. both of these conversations are remarkably intimate for how little these characters have interacted beforehand. remember, 6:02 total of Nile and Andy alone together with heavy animosity (Andy shot Nile in the head ffs!) before things between them started to warm up. granted, the conversation where they first start to warm to each other is right after Nile's cave scene with Booker and Andy's scene with Celeste, so an argument could be made that this was the point in the movie where Nile started to feel ready to open up to the other immortals generally and her first one-on-one conversation once she got there was with Booker before Andy. I'm not saying you have to ship them just because they get so close so quick, but the numbers sure do make it clear that us BoNers aren't making this shit up out of nowhere.

Nile and Booker's heart-to-heart in the mine is the third-longest one-on-one conversation in the whole movie — third after Andy kidnapping Nile and Nile's sequence with Copley, which are both heavy on action and exposition and antagonism, making this the longest intimate conversation in the movie. their other heart-to-heart, 1:18 on the balcony outside the pub, is on par with Joe and Nicky's 1:17 in the van.

there's also a 51 sec sequence during the Merrick tower fight where it intercuts pretty much equally between three subsets of the action: Andy going off on her own with an axe, Joe waiting for Nicky to wake up after that head shot, and Nile and Booker being drift compatible when Nile's gun jams. we're not making this shit up out of nowhere.

ok back to our blorbos in chief. we get 4:07 of Nile as the sole focus, and 3:31 of the same for Andy.

the sequence of Nile going through hell on base just because she fucking lived (laser eyes @ her squad forever) lasts 1:14 and includes a few lines from minor characters. we get 15 sec of her first dreaming of the others and waking up unmoored, then a 20 sec reprise with her nightmare of the first person she killed. the sequence of her driving away from Copley's then figuring out what the empty gun clip means is 48 sec. and then, one of the things that stood out to me the most in really digging into these numbers: just how frequently and for how long the camera lingers on Nile's face in this movie.

extended closeups of Nile with no dialogue and no montage:

10 seconds staring at the car she crushed, killing Merrick in the process but somehow not herself

36 seconds in the elevator

and a whopping 44 seconds of listening to Frank Ocean

that's fully 1 minute and thirty seconds of this movie's 2 hr 5 min credits-included runtime devoted exclusively to long takes of Nile Freeman's face.

Andy's sole-focus time is a little less tidy, because the majority of it isn't precisely focused on her like with Nile. we get 15 sec of her staring at her hand, realizing her immortality is gone. I could have coded all the pieces of the movie more granularly to find all the moments where we get Andy reaction shots, but I also could've done that with all of them and I'm but one humble spreadsheet lover, and it's more interesting to me that Gina primarily uses other kinds of film language to put us into Andy's perspective.

1:35 of her cutting through all those mercs in the church — other people are active in this scene, but they're not shown as people, and the horror of that is exactly the point, for the viewer, for Nile, and for Andy herself

41 sec of her voiceover at the opening of the movie, over clips of the kill floor scene

1 min of her moodily sitting in the car after the pharmacy and flashing back to Lykon's death

the Andy/Quynh flashback sequence that's a subset of Nicky and Joe narrating to Nile is 1:31, so counting that alongside this flashback here brings us to a total of 2:31 of Andy/Quynh(/Lykon) alone together screen time. almost precisely equal to Joe and Nicky's total 2:24 alone together.

further underlining Booker and Copley as our tritagonists, we get one scene of on-screen alone time for each of them: 32 seconds of Booker being drunk six months later and 28 seconds of Copley reacting to the kill floor footage. it's easy to focus on the Andy in a Union uniform element of this Copley scene, but a photo of his late wife is visible in almost every frame. I went back and double checked — only 3 sec of those 28 don't contain that photo of his wife displayed proudly between the kill floor footage and the Civil War photo, 3 sec of Copley in closeup. now that's what I call environmental storytelling.

we get almost exactly 5 min each with the sets Andy + Booker + Copley, Andy + Booker, and Andy + Nile + Booker. ABC and ANB conversations tend toward driving the plot and fleshing out detail about immortality, though a decent chunk of ANB in the "is this a Rodin?" part of the cave scene is Nile and Booker talking about following the money (their first moment of drift compatibility!) while Andy angsts nearby, and a decent chunk of ABC at Copley's place is Andy and Booker's heartbreaking "this is what you wanted" "not like this" exchange while Copley awkwardly hovers. just under half of Andy and Booker's 5:01 on screen alone together is about his betrayal, 2:13 across three scenes. the other half breaks out pretty evenly between them talking about Nile, making battle plans, and just being pals.

has any mid-budget gritty action movie ever done it better? even the infodumps are full of character and relationship details.

I also find it noteworthy that Booker and Copley are never alone together, and they never directly acknowledge anything about their relationship. we know from what they tell other characters that they've been in contact before the events of the movie, probably for some time in some detail. we know they worked together to ultimately enable the cartoon-villain antagonists to do their villainy. Copley is direct about how these results were absolutely not what he intended, and we can infer from Booker's behavior that he wasn't aiming for decades of medical torture either. but we get no information about how they feel about each other. now that I'm looking at it with this frame, it seems like the absence of information is itself a kind of telling — Booker and Copley maybe purposefully avoiding 1:1 contact, purposefully treating each other as mere acquaintances when others are around, because to do otherwise would be to look their guilt in the eye. oh shit I think I might have given myself a whole new meta idea on this tangent here: Copley and Booker as mirrors for each other.

disclaimer as we're nearing the end that there's inevitably going to be bias and error in something like this. I measured by seconds not milliseconds and I wasn't always precise about where I paused to note timestamps at scene changes. sometimes I included what ended up amounting to several seconds of establishing shots and sometimes I didn't. and there are a bunch of edge cases where there's more than one way to count who was an active part of which scenes, like for example:

I separated out Andy and Booker's opening motorcycle stalking and Don Quijote chat from the later part of what was probably just one scene in the script, where Booker talks to the hotel clerk while Andy interacts with tourists nearby

I included all as one Nile + Dizzy + Jay scene the sequence where Dizzy and Jay talk to each other about Nile before they go into the med tent and act shitty to her face about how Nile's still alive

I counted as Copley + Merrick the conversation in the car where Keane and Kozak are present and react on camera but don't have lines per se

similarly I counted as Andy + Booker the "she wants to talk to her family" exchange after Nile and Nicky leave the dinner table; Joe's still sitting there next to them but he doesn't say anything and the camera doesn't focus on him

I didn't try to delete the time where Andrei said/did stuff from the 4:26 Andy kidnaps Nile sequence but I did remove a Keane cut-away from a later Andy + Nile scene

so much has already been lovingly written about how well Joe and Nicky spend their short on-screen alone time and rightly so. I don't have anything new to add there so I'll take a moment instead to shout out to the 27 sec of Nicky telling Kozak to go fuck herself, and also the iconic Joe headbutting Merrick. fuck, this movie is so so good. every moment is a delight.

#the old guard #tog meta #tog #mine