“This Is the World We Made”: Queer Metaphor, Neo-Colonial Militarization, and Scientific Ethics in The Old Guard (2020)

Abstract

The Old Guard, an action and speculative film released by Netflix in 2020, is based on a comic book written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Leandro Fernandez and was adapted to film by director Gina Prince Bythewood. Her adaptation of the violent and bloody graphic novel centers around a group of immortals—of whom half are canonically LGBTQ+ and of color—and their mission to save the world. The film directly questions the representation of queer characters who must die as a way to center the heterosexual hero—also known as the “bury-your-gays” trope. By not only focusing on the subversivity of queer love and the violence that is often predominant in action cinema, but also in subverting queer history by making it unable to die, unable to be killed, The Old Guard destabilizes how one might view speculative action cinema. Furthermore, this paper addresses questions of unethical scientific experimentation, as well as the representations and subversions of globalization and neo-colonialism in the ways of militarization, queer metaphor, and the rewriting of history. By investigating these representations, this paper argues that The Old Guard imagines a future without queer death, but it also simultaneously interrogates the ethics of neocolonial militarization and western sciences within action cinema through a BIPOC, female, and queer gaze.