The Old Guard: Here's everything you need to know about the first movie before the sequel premieres on Netflix

The Old Guard is coming back sharper, older, louder. Not just with swords drawn, but with history carved into every blow. Five years after their first mission on Netflix, the immortals return to finish what time couldn’t erase.

Andy has lost her edge, but not her fire. Nile has become the spine of something new. And somewhere in the shadows, Quỳnh waits with fury sharpened over centuries of silence. And they will soon be back on The Old Guard 2.

Before the sequel cuts through the screen this July, the story demands a reckoning. The Old Guard introduced more than a group of undying warriors. It set the battlefield for a war against forgetfulness. Against greed. Against the cruelty of being needed and discarded for generations.

They bled in Sudan, broke in Paris, rose again in London. They’ve been hunted, betrayed, exposed. And still, they choose to fight. Because The Old Guard goes beyond telling a story about power. It’s about the cost of carrying it for too long.

Immortal pain, timeless war

There is no glory in living forever. Just war, woven through time like a wound that refuses to close. From medieval battlefields to modern warzones, Andy and her team move like ghosts across the centuries, leaving no legacy but the lives they’ve saved and the scars they carry.

The Old Guard begins with betrayal masked as duty, a mission in South Sudan that turns into a trap, exposing their secret to the world. Bullets tear through their bodies, but they rise. And when Nile wakes from her first death with a blade through her throat, the nightmare begins again.

Andy finds her, as she’s found all the others before. There’s no invitation to join, only the brutal certainty of what she’s become. Together they run through deserts and cities, hunted by a pharmaceutical empire that sees profit in their blood.

Andy is captured. Joe and Nicky are taken. Betrayals are part of the game in The Old Guard. Booker, the man Nile had trusted for centuries, sells them out for a dream of peace he no longer believes in.

But Nile refuses to stand aside. She storms into the storm, pulling Copley into the fight and bringing the Old Guard back from the brink. The battle ends with rupture, not with triumph. Booker is cast out. Andy begins to feel time again. And in the last quiet moment, a door creaks open in Paris, and Quỳnh, the one who drowned for five hundred years, finally comes home. This was the status quo in The Old Guard.

What you need to remember before the sequel

Nile was the last to die. A clean blade to the neck in the middle of a military operation, and then silence. Until she woke up in the dark, whole again, marked by a nightmare she didn’t understand.

On the other side of the world, four people felt it. A call through time, through blood. Andy had seen it before. Every new immortal is born into confusion and pain, and there’s no guidebook for the eternity ahead.

She brought Nile in. Rough, cold, determined. Nile resisted, tried to return to her old life, but the past no longer held her. What awaited was a team forged in centuries of conflict.

Joe and Nicky, lovers who once killed each other in the Crusades, now fight side by side with a bond deeper than death. Booker, the broken idealist who survived Napoleon only to lose everything that made him human. And Andy, oldest of them all, too tired to hope, too skilled to stop.

Their mission in South Sudan, set up by ex-CIA agent Copley, was meant to be simple. It turned into a betrayal. Cameras recorded them healing from bullet wounds, and soon they were targets.

Merrick, a pharmaceutical mogul, wanted to weaponize their immortality. Joe and Nicky were taken. Andy was wounded. Booker, desperate for answers, made a deal that cost him everything.

But Nile changed the game. She chose the fight. With Copley’s help, she led the rescue, shattered Merrick’s empire, and reminded the Guard why they existed in the first place. To protect. To endure. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Andy, once invincible, began to bleed. Something shifted. The gift was fading. Booker was exiled, sentenced to a century of solitude. And in a final twist, the past clawed its way to the present. In a quiet Paris apartment, soaked in shadows, Quỳnh emerged. She had drowned and returned. And now, she is coming.

Blood, love, and loyalty

Immortality comes with grief that deepens rather than fades. Each member of the Guard carries a history of loss etched into their silence, their glances, their blades. Andy walks ahead of them all, the oldest, the most fractured. She no longer remembers every life she saved, but she remembers the ones she couldn’t. Her leadership is not built on wisdom. It's built on scars.

Nile enters their world with fire in her bones and questions she refuses to silence. She's not just a recruit. She's the fulcrum, the reminder that the world still changes and that purpose must evolve with it. Joe and Nicky stood at the center, embodying the emotional core of the story. Their presence gave the film a pulse that refused to fade, a bond forged in battle and carried across centuries. Their kiss was a vow carved into the genre. A promise wrapped in armor.

Booker carries a different weight. He believed in redemption. In endings. He sold his family out to a man who promised answers and paid for it with exile. But pain never leaves him. It pulses under his skin like memory.

Copley, once the betrayer, found his own path back. He saw the truth in Nile's conviction, in Andy’s rage, and turned his betrayal into a vow: to protect them from the outside, to preserve what the world doesn’t deserve.

No one in The Old Guard is just a soldier. They are walking histories. Love that has survived fire. Betrayal that refuses to fade. Loyalty that endures even when it’s broken.

A Netflix hero born from pain

The Old Guard rose from quiet fire. It carried the weight of centuries and the gravity of stories told in scars. Adapted from the graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández, the film arrived in a year already shaped by fear and distance. When it landed on Netflix in 2020, it reached over 78 million households within a month. Its strength came from presence. Every frame held purpose. Every silence rang louder than the gunfire.

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the first black woman to lead a major comic-book production, The Old Guard brought precision without vanity, motion grounded in history. The action moved like memory, sharp and unrelenting.

Reviewers pointed to the film’s choreography, the emotional stamina of its leads, the quiet sense of legacy buried in its pacing. The villain leaned toward excess, the rhythm walked its own path. Yet those textures helped shape the myth. The Old Guard flowed like a dirge, burned like a confession. A war story for the tired, the scarred, the undefeated.

A sequel followed by necessity. One story fractured, and through the break, Quỳnh returned.

The Old Guard 2 will break the cycle

The war changed shape. It slipped beneath the surface, waiting. When The Old Guard 2 arrives on Netflix this July 2, the rules will shift. Andy, once indestructible, has begun to feel the pull of time. The wounds stay longer. The silence cuts deeper. Mortality, once a distant memory, now walks beside her. But even without her healing gift, she remains the axis. The Guard moves because she still chooses to fight.

Quỳnh returns not as a friend, but as a reckoning. Centuries of drowning left her hollow and sharpened. She was the only one who ever matched Andy’s strength, and now she moves with a rage that no longer recognizes loyalty. What began as a reunion will crack into confrontation. And in that fracture, a new enemy rises.

Discord, played by Uma Thurman, enters the story with the elegance of a predator. Tuah, brought to life by Henry Golding, carries secrets that could rewrite the Guard’s origin. Together, they blur the lines between threat and memory.

Victoria Mahoney steps in as director, bringing a new rhythm to the battlefield. Greg Rucka remains in command of the script, joined by Sarah L. Walker. The sequel spans cities and centuries, trading containment for scale. Action bleeds across rooftops, ruins, and shorelines. But beneath the spectacle, the core remains intact: protection through pain, connection through choice, purpose through loss.

The trailer promises clashes lit by steel and memory. Andy and Discord cross blades in a sequence framed like ritual. Joe and Nicky, once again at the heart, anchor the storm with a love that never wavers. Booker, scarred and exiled, reenters the field with nothing left to lose. Nile leads with clarity, no longer the rookie but the future.

The Old Guard 2 advances the story with heavier stakes, deeper wounds, and a battlefield reshaped by memory.

The legacy of pain and protection

Some stories march forward. Others circle back, drawn by the echo of unfinished vows. The Old Guard belongs to the second kind. It lives in repetition, in the quiet decision to keep standing after every loss. Each member of the Guard carries wounds that never fully close. Not because they fail to heal, but because they choose to remember.

This is what makes their fight matter. They are not gods. They are not symbols. They are survivors. They protect a world that forgets them, that turns them into shadows and legends, and still they step between the blade and the innocent. Even when the cost is exile. Even when love becomes a target. Even when death no longer offers rest.

Now the story grows sharper. Andy walks the earth without her shield. Quỳnh returns with her fury intact. Nile leads with a new kind of strength, forged in loyalty rather than time. The Guard moves forward, fractured but intact, ready to face whatever comes next.

Because protection is not a power. It’s a decision. And no one makes it with more clarity than the ones who have already lost everything.