Reading 'The Old Guard' Script, and Feeling Some Kinda Way™
For the most part, nothing about the script deviates too much from the final product (so it was kind've a bore to read). There was a little more time dedicated to Joe, Booker, and Nicky's friendship, but nothing the film couldn't live without. A lot of the final product instead focuses on comparing and contrasting Booker and Andromache's shared woes over immortality.
The most interesting thing about the script might be how it opens. Instead of an opening that focuses on Andromache and her depression via voice-over, it's more omniscient and of the past. The script established the longevity of the characters by showing you where they started (800 CE, on the Silk Road). And it's playing with the standard fantasy fare once popular in shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Legend of the Seeker. If you're unfamiliar with the comic books this would either be a surprise (based on what you've seen in media) or absolutely confusing. Obviously, Gina-Prince Bythewood filmed the opening, but chopped it to bits to fit the final version.
It was a fun start. But I think the most surprising thing about the script was its utilization of Lykon*. The omniscience of the opening and his role in it establishes this is about three characters: Him, Quynh, and Andromache. This was who Andromache was with before the team she has now. More interesting was the fact that Lykon and Quyhn were specifically in a romantic relationship, and that she and Andromache were just friends.
(1) The start of the script is basically about defining his character in relation to what he means to Quynh (specifically) and Andromache.
(2) Lykon/Quynh's relationship meant he was more present in the story. i.e., he wasn't a blink-and-you-miss-it example that immortals could permanently die, never to be named or seen again.
(3) After his death, Quynh is so bereaved, she abandons Andromache and tries to die in the desert to join him in the afterlife. It doesn't work (for obvious reasons). Andromache is the long-suffering friend who follows after her and won't let her commit suicide.
(4) Quynh is not only grieving, she's angry at the fact that Lykon "left" her. "He was supposed to live forever," she tells Andromache, all while rejecting food and threatening to kill herself again.
(5) Andromache's loneliness is re-contextualized and becomes about keeping Quynh from self-isolation. Tells her she's grateful to have met her. As a consequence, "You and me until the end" sounds less empty on account of what it means in relation to Lykon's passing.
(6) The way Quynh talks/grieves about Lykon gave me the impression she met Lykon first and they met Andromache later down the line. So, instead of a Lykon who doesn't dream of Noriko (comics), we get a Lykon who might've known Quynh before Andromache. And I think that's a cooler idea tbh.
(You could certainly argue otherwise, what with Andy not including Lykon in her speech to Quynh on pg 62. She could also just not care about Lykon outside of what he meant to Quynh.)
(7) Quynh-as-subplot moves away from being an answer to Andy's thousands of years of isolation and loneliness, and more about the two individuals she ends up losing in esp violent ways.
(8) Lykon doesn't serenely accept his death like some wise negro with oblique African proverbs at the ready. Instead of, "It's time", his last words are to Quynh, communicating that he loves her ("My heart... my love..."). Basically, he wasn't expecting to and didn't want to die.
Ultimately, Lykon is still a deadbrowalking with no story external to others. In the final cut, his death is the only important thing about him. In the script we get a brief glimpse into his role in Andy's original group. There's a featurette on Rotten Tomatoes that says Quynh and Andromache meet him in 331 BCE (Lykon is explicitly last of the oldest immortals in the featurette), during Alexander's invasion of Gaza, Palestine. And it prompts me to ask, what was he doing before then? What was his life or reputation like? (And because the opening was about a trio, there was certainly a way to integrate answers to that into the film/script if the intention was to make Lykon more than disposable.)
That said, Lykon/Quynh?
I'm about it, honestly. It's a deliberate inversion on Lykon as a (minor) character centered around Andromache (in the comics). Had any of that remained in the film, it would've re-contextualized Quynh's role in the story. She had a companion and Andromache. Her desert march is an expression of grief. She's someone who preferred to be reunited with her lover in death, but learned to continue on with her friend. To keep helping people.
So when she's condemned to death at the bottom of the sea, it's almost ironic. She got death, but she can't join her ancestors* or Lykon. And that compounds with her realizing Andromache and the others gave up at some point. Lykon would've haunted the narrative in way he absolutely doesn't in the final product.
It's kind've hard to ignore how these minor changes altered the tone and the use of the character in the film. That the mere glimpses of Lykon was a far lengthier sequence filmed for that initial opening, and how he basically got cut from the film, guts me. He was exercised out of a relationship and subplot - more or less in service to Andromache.
Basically there would've been text. Text in the sense that he would be seen, named, mourned. Text in the sense that the vagueness in the movies between Quynh/Andromache was not baiting or implicitly romantic*. Lykon's death explains the way Andy says, "I lost a soldier" (beyond just being emotionally dishonest with Nile). They really had no intention of touching the Noriko/Andromache relationship on top of Joe/Nicky (so in a sense J/N is tokenized), and just kind've fucked about with the N/A audience and let them come to their own conclusions.
Joe even says, "they were the best of friends". I'm cackling the more I think about it. No lesbians, bisexuals, and no Black men with Asian women.
Other things I liked about the script:
(9) Quynh actually escapes the coffin in Nile's dream. The coffin rusts open, but she but keeps drowning. She's at the bottom of the ocean, so, yeah, she wouldn't be getting topside any time soon on account of crushing pressure/the bends.
(10) There's this fear Nile has of Quynh finding her (based on what she felt in her dream) should she ever actually reach the surface. Which makes her showing up at the end of the film a little more foreboding. I'm thinking, "What would this had meant for Nile?"
(11) Nile wanting to be an art student is a nice bit of character fluff that unfortunately went missing in favor of hyper-focus on her military career. Her knowing who Rodan (Rodin?) is makes a lot more sense. On top of wanting to get back to her family, Nile also had ambitions/goals she wanted to archive before immortality. Imagine if she had pursued those goals in the sequel as a way of reintroducing her to the audience, instead of a 007 gambit.
(12) Their most recent injuries scared over before their immortality expires.
(13) There were a "handful" (more than two?) immortals Andromache encountered. Of course that could just be Booker's interpretation of truth from Andy. I'm not sure he knew about Lykon. He also wasn't aware that immortality had an expiration date in the script. I feel like that would've radically altered his decision making methinks (but maybe not).
The Rotten Tomatoes featurette doesn't offer anything particularly interesting/new in the way of Nile like the script did, though.
