The Old Guard
The Old Guard is emblematic of all of the worst tendencies of Netflix original content. It’s not that it’s complete and utter garbage. At least if it were terrible, it would evoke some kind of emotional response. I would rather a movie made me either love it or hate it. But when a movie forces me into the emotional purgatory of apathy, that’s something I refuse to forgive. Like the vast majority of Netflix original movies and TV shows I’ve seen, The Old Guard is neither great nor terrible, but instead aggressively mediocre and eminently forgettable. Sorry, what was I talking about again? Netflix’s biggest enemy seems to have been its overnight success as the giant of a media streaming industry that they essentially created. At first, their challenge was how to secure all the licencing and rights to hundreds of thousands of movies. To their credit, they never rested entirely on their laurels, and adapted their business model proactively in anticipation of market trends. Knowing that they couldn’t keep the entire pie to themselves forever, especially considering how lucrative that pie was,…