Skeleton of a Better Movie - Jason Bourne (2016)
Been a long time since I updated this series. The post was half-written as of two months ago but ... well, let's just say I got a fire lit under my ass recently. Expect my Steemit activity level to go waaaaay up.
Thus without further ado, I present to you ...
In the city, always a reflection; in the woods, always a sound.
And the desert?
You don't want to go in the desert. - Spartan (2004)
Back in the antediluvian days of 2007, The Bourne Ultimatum was released to much fanfare and great success. It was a fine sequel showing a Jason Bourne who was older but no less dangerous than the amnesiac hero from the previous two books movies. It had everything: David Strathairn as Noah Vosen, the return of Pamela Landy, the Desh fight and, immediately prior to that, it had:
However, as good as all of those were, my personal favourite sequence in the entire movie was the Waterloo Station scene. Early in the movie, we witness Bourne as he runs rings around a team of CIA operatives in Waterloo Station, simultaneously keeping himself off camera and out of sight while also guiding an amateur to do the same via phone call, orchestrating a symphony of surveillance evasion. It was a masterclass.
In the world of a decade after, that seems a lot less likely. Welcome to the world of the fourth Bourne movie fittingly named Jason Bourne. Here, the world has gotten so much smaller than it was in the first movie, hell even smaller than in 2007's Ultimatum where we saw this process starting. More phones, more cameras, more drones, more satellites; places to hide are growing fewer in number, the dark spots on the map getting grey, the world is being sliced thinner and thinner and finer and finer. Like splitting hairs. Or splitting the angels on the head of a pin. Heck, it's getting so that even an operative of Bourne's caliber is almost paralyzed in terms of their ability to move unnoticed. And compelled to take extreme measures just for a few minutes of unmonitored conversation.
We also see a grimmer more taciturn Bourne than in the past. It's a progression since the first one so that fits. Interesting that they jumped on that new Hollywood bandwagon where CGI is used to resurrect the younger selves of aging/aged actors that we've seen a lot of recently (Benjamin Button, Captain America: Civil War, Fast and Furious 7, Ant Man, the latest Star Wars and now this one) Expect to see more of that in the future culminating in the use of CGI likenesses of actors from the 1920s when the copyright on using their likenesses expires.
In the beginning, we find Bourne punishing himself for our sins by engaging in underground pitfights for pocket change, letting himself take hits when he knows he can end the fight in seconds. There are holes that can't be filled, severed burned-off ground-out parts of him that can't be restored just by regaining his memory. Driven by justified paranoia to live in the literal borderlands (some shithole Greek border town with a diverse population of hard men with things to hide and few questions about pasts) in the process staying off the grid.
Because boy is "the grid" out there now. I mean, I talk quite a bit about the surveillance economy and I will do so even more in future because wow, do you see what's going on in the world today? Alexa and algorithms that feed you ads on products you talked about with someone because it detected both your phones within the same three-cell-tower triangulated area. The world is getting scarier and it only looks like its doing it slowly so we think we're in control right up until we're not.
Early in the movie, we see the return of Nicky Parsons, the lowly young CIA techie analyst from the first movie who he helps escape to start a new life in Ultimatum. She's back now, years later, hardened and up-skilled by life on the run and has apparently fallen in with some kind of Wikileaks-meets-Anonymous-style hacker collective. She puts herself and Bourne back on the CIA's radar by hacking one of their databases using an access device from 1993 or so (and boy is it strange to people my age to think of the 90s as ancient history but they really are now)
Soon she and Bourne are meeting in the crowded streets of a Greek city in the middle of a massive riot because, when you're a fugitive wanted by the most technologically advanced spy apparatus on the planet, it helps to be surrounded by thousands of running fighting screaming people who are overturning cars, burning storefronts and fighting cops. Even with all that, facial recognition still nails both of them.
Bad stuff happens and soon Bourne is on the run alone, pursued by the CIA and a fellow Treadstone/Blackbriar graduate known simply as The Asset. Remember Castel and The Professor from the first one? Well, the Asset is happy to give all that and more; in as much as he enjoys anything, he enjoys this: being the efficient killer in the service of shadows and secrets.
We also meet Heather Lee (the luminous Alicia Vikander), the CIA Cyber Ops head and Kallor, basically Hindu-American Mark Zuckerberg who happens to be in bed with the CIA because they saw the value of a social network where people worldwide happily volunteer all their information instead of needing it tortured out of them in a Guantanamo black site. Aside: is it just me or is it not bloody obvious that Heather Lee and Kalloor know each other? Obviously, they went to college together and constantly battled for top of the class. One went on to be a social network billionaire, the other went on to be the unreasonably yet logically young head of CIA Cyber Ops (I mean, who would you put in charge of cyber ops in this day and age? Some fossil that learned his computer skills in the days of fucking punch-cards and shit? Fuck no.)
Related to this, I find myself fascinated by Dassault, the leader of the hacker collective that Nicky has apparently been rolling with. His apartment is abundantly spacious yet thoroughly austere, furnished by little more than the de rigeuer accouterments of tech-inclined modern life -- one big fancy touchscreen phone, one tiny Nokia with five-day battery life on a single charge and two laptops. From his Eddy-Redmayne's-uglier-cousin looks to the collection of bare metal weights on his barbells, his one scene is a masterclass in characterization. Moreover, it leads us to the point where you no longer need to be an actual intelligence agent these days to find yourself in need of tradecraft. We are all spies now, surrounded by surveillance, equipped with tools and gadgets, forced to be aware, to be
conscious of what we do and say and where. Paranoia, online and offline, as the line blurs, as the world shifts from binary to quantum. Politics no longer allows us the luxury of pretending it is something old men in suits do somewhere else, it is as close as the cameras on the street corners, the money in our pockets and the clothes on our backs.
Here's the thing: Jason Bourne is a completely unnecessary movie. It did not need to be made. Everyone involved is rich enough, Matt Damon has plenty else going on in his career and frankly, Ultimatum answered all the questions we could possibly ever want from this franchise. Making a fourth movie (because, while I love Jeremy Renner, I do not acknowledge the existence or canonicity of The Bourne Legacy) meant having to create new and frankly dumber questions for our hero to be forced to answer. So here we are, doing this dance again because Hollywood's obsessive nostalgia has become a snake swallowing its own tail.
Having said that, there's a lot to like about Jason Bourne and you should totally see it if you're a fan of the series.
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its great movie thanks for sharing.. keep voting
Thanks for commenting and yes, quite a good movie.
The Bourne series are amazing.
Agreed. It's possibly my favorite spy-thriller action series.