Two of the Best Scenes Ever are in “The Old Guard”

Have you guys seen “The Old Guard?” It’s a pretty good action movie on its face.

But have you watched it again since it came out a year ago? I just did a week ago, and I want to encourage you to watch it again.

There are two scenes in particular that I somehow…didn’t fully grasp the first time around. I’m going to try to keep this spoiler-free, but I dunno, this involves plot elements, so you be the judge of whether or not you go forward from here.

The first scene is at the beginning, when they’re setting up the team’s characters, and before these incredible semi-immortal badasses get down to planning their next op, two of the team members hand Charlize Theron’s character a small paper-wrapped square of…baklava.

And so much is packed in this one moment. Charlize Theron takes a bite that she clearly relishes…and then begins analyzing it by flavor, identifying components, and finally coming to a conclusion about its origin, which just thrills and pleases her team.

I keep thinking about this scene, because of how it works to establish the levels of trust between these people, and also how incredibly capable Charlize Theron’s character is — how sensitive she is, and how much her team understands that — and then there’s this other angle, which is that it shows how much they all love each other. How they will bring her baklava from across the planet because they know she loves it, and this is a ritual for them.

It’s a short scene, and it’s easy to miss what’s really happening here the first time you watch it, because there’s an urge in the viewer to get to the action, because this is an action movie.

And that brings me to the second scene. It’s after they’ve escaped their bonds in the villain’s lair, and have armed themselves, and they have to fight their way to Merrick (the bad guy). And they become this team that is just an incredible fighting machine — they are multiple arms of a single organism, and they coordinate with each other without looking or checking or wasting any movements at all.

They hand off opponents for the team member behind them to kill off, they pass firearms blindly to someone they know is out of ammunition behind them, they shield each other and the critical members of the group from bullets…it’s amazing.

Again, it’s somewhat easy to miss the first time around, but watching it again, you realize some real attention went into the choreography of a scene where people who have practiced with each other for hundreds of years get to do the thing they’re best at.

It’s really fun stuff to watch, but it also makes me a bit sad, because this sort of cooperation is the exact opposite of what 21st century America encourages. In the land of ego and glorification of the individual, watching a team work seamlessly and smoothly feels like a kind of loss.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this far!