Our feature film last night was The Bourne Ultimatum, third and last in the original cycle of films from the 2000’s based (more or less) on Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne novels — at least the three he wrote personally before he died and his estate and his publishers hired another writer named Eric von Lustbader to write at least eight more books about the character. (This is the modern age in which they don’t let popular characters die just because their creators have; I was particularly incensed when I heard of the publication of a new Hercule Poirot book because Agatha Christie had been very insistent that the characters die with her; in the 1950’s she wrote Curtain and Sleeping Murder, in which she killed off her two most popular sleuth characters — Poirot and Miss Marple, respectively — and arranged that these books would not be published until after her own death and they would mark the ends of both characters.) Jason Bourne has had an odd cinematic history; in 1988 the first book in the cycle, The Bourne Identity, was filmed as a TV-movie with Richard Chamberlain as Bourne and Jaclyn Smith from Charlie’s Angels as the female lead — an economics professor who hooks up with Bourne and ends up in love with him — in a version that apparently came closer to its source novel than any of the films with Matt Damon in the role. In the early 2000’s director Doug Liman contacted Ludlum and arranged for the rights to remake The Bourne Identity, and he set up the film at Universal and cast Damon in the lead and a quite good German actress named Franka Potente as his girlfriend, who in this version wasn’t an economics professor but a “gypsy” touring Europe as a sort of neo-hippie — only Liman had a lot of battles with Universal during the shoot and ended up being removed from the sequelae and replaced by Paul Greengrass.
The second film in the sequence, The
Bourne Supremacy, came out in 2004, two
years after the Liman/Damon version of The Bourne Identity, and instead of the real-life terrorist “Carlos the
Jackal” whom Ludlum had used as his principal villain (but whom the filmmakers
couldn’t use because he’d been captured in real life between the publication of
Ludlum’s novels and the films), Bourne’s main adversaries in the movies are
within the CIA, for which he nominally worked. It seems that Bourne — or, to
use his birth name, David Webb — was recruited for an off-the-books CIA program
called “Treadstone” which would train people to become free-lance assassins,
basically killing on command anyone the CIA bigwigs in charge of the program
wanted out of the way for any reason at all. By the end of the second film, The
Bourne Supremacy, the CIA has formally
abolished “Treadstone” but in fact has merely replaced it with “Blackbriar,”
which does the same thing only it works in association with the National
Security Agency (NSA), whose unparalleled capability for putting the entire
world under surveillance allows it to identify the targets which the CIA will
then use the Blackbriar nèe Treadstone
assassins to eliminate. At one point the CIA official in charge of Blackbriar,
Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), explains to his subordinate, Pam Landy (Joan
Allen, whose authoritative performance in The Bourne Supremacy stood out and is even better here, mainly because
this time around the character is drawn more multidimensionally and given a
crisis of conscience) that Blackbriar is “the umbrella program for all our
black-ops. Full envelope intrusion, rendition, experimental interrogation — it
is all run out of this office.” (The use of the term “rendition” — meaning
kidnapping people and taking them to countries where they can legally be
tortured — suggested an interesting possibility for a Bourne storyline: he’s
“rendered” to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and has to figure out how to escape and
outwit his torturers before they either break him or kill him.) I liked The
Bourne Ultimatum best of the three movies
in the “Bourne Trilogy” boxed set because it was the most uncompromising
politically; instead of a rogue operation being conducted by a few agents
without the knowledge of the CIA’s upper echelons, this film depicts the CIA’s
director, Tom Cronin (Tom Gallup), as fully aware and on board with Blackbriar
and its mission, which is to eliminate anyone the CIA feels is a threat to itself or its mission
without any of that messy “due process” stuff about arresting and trying people
in civilian or military courts.
What’s most chilling about the first half-hour
of The Bourne Ultimatum is not
only the sheer off-handedness with which the CIA officials in charge of
Blackbriar pronounce death sentences on anyone who gets in their way —
including Simon Ross (Paddy Considine, who for my money is hotter than Matt
Damon!), a reporter for the Guardian
who’s writing stories about Treadstone and has a secret source within the CIA,
Neal Daniels (Colin Stinton), who gets shot and killed by Blackbriar assassin
Paz (Edgar Ramirez) in the middle of Waterloo Station when he breaks Bourne’s
carefully given instructions on how to stay alive — but the huge amount of surveillance
infrastructure that has been created by public and private players alike, and
the ability of the NSA to find and trace anyone, virtually anywhere in the world, with this
technology. Though made six years before Edward Snowden’s revelations (which
were published for the first time in the Guardian), the plot of The Bourne Ultimatum — worked out by Tony Gilroy, though at least two
other writers (Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi) were brought in later,
presumably to smooth out Gilroy’s tangled plot line and cut the number of
reversals down to a tolerable level — eerily anticipates them. Another aspect
of the script for The Bourne Ultimatum that anticipates later events is the off-handedness with which
Blackbriar targets U.S. citizens, as well as foreigners, for extrajudicial
assassination; ever since President Obama put U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki on a “hit list” in May 2010 and he was killed in a drone strike in
Yemen on September 30, 2011, the U.S. government has proclaimed that merely being
an American citizen does not immunize you from being “taken out” anywhere in
the world if America’s secret government decides you’re an active participant
on the other side of the “War on Terror.” (Two weeks after al-Awlaki’s death,
his son was killed in another U.S. drone strike, leading to speculation that
the U.S. government was out to wipe out not only al-Awlaki himself but his
entire family.) In The Bourne Ultimatum we’re given so many shots of ordinary surveillance cameras in public
places that we realize with a start how used to them we’ve become and how we’ve
come to think of them as benign, little realizing that Big Brother is indeed
watching us 24/7 and these systems can be taken over at an instant and used by
an unscrupulous government literally
to target people.
Of course The Bourne Ultimatum is also an action movie, full of car chases shot in
Paul Greengrass’s trademark Jerkicam style (he shot the action in both The
Bourne Supremacy and this film mostly with
hand-held cameras so it looks like they’re literally happening before our eyes
and the camerapeople themselves look as perplexed at what’s going on as we do,
not like what they are — people recording a carefully contrived version of
“reality” from the filmmakers’ imaginations) and plot twists that defy the laws
of physics (Bourne pulling a bullet out of himself, and for the climax Bourne
taking a 10-story header out of a New York building, landing in the Hudson
River below and surviving) as
well as inept plot holes. For one thing, the film suddenly shifts locales and
Bourne seems to be able to turn up in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London or wherever
a jump-cut from Greengrass and his editor, Christopher Rouse, can take him.
Apparently, despite all the precautions he has to take on land to make sure
Blackbriar’s assassin de jour
doesn’t pick him off, Bourne can just breeze his way onto a plane in any
airport in the world and fly to any other airport in the world without so much
as a peep from airport security! Charles also noted that the supposedly
super-secret headquarters of Blackbriar is in a New York City office building
with a window that doesn’t even have mirrored one-way glass — so Bourne can
(and does) spy into the office from outside and everything going on in there is
in his full view. Though movie chase scenes used special effects to defy the
laws of physics well before the invention of computer-generated imagery (CGI),
the advent of CGI seems not only to have made this sort of thing easier but
encouraged it and led to movies like this in which you just have to set aside
your knowledge of the laws of physics for two hours and let yourself be
entertained by these physically impossible scenes.
There are other problems
with this movie, including Matt Damon’s limited acting skills — frankly, the
more Jason Bourne (t/n David Webb) finds out about who he is, what he does and
why he became an automaton-like killer for the CIA (revealed in a climactic
scene with his trainer, played in an old-pro performance by Albert Finney that
reminded me a great deal of the Julia Roberts-Mel Gibson Conspiracy
Theory, also about a man destroyed by his
training as a black-ops assassin), the harder it is for Damon’s talents, such
as they are, to keep pace with the character — and the virtual disappearance of
female lead Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), who is Pam’s immediate subordinate at
the CIA but helps Bourne either as a protest against the way he’s being
targeted, out of a romantic and/or sexual interest in him, or both, who looks
like she’s going to be an important character in the first half of the film but
virtually disappears in the second. Charles said he probably would have liked The
Bourne Ultimatum better if we hadn’t
watched it so soon after The Bourne Supremacy — the car chases, on-foot pursuits and shots of
Bourne and anyone trying to help him literally in the cross-hairs of killers
like Paz (Edgar Ramirez) — naming this character after the Spanish word for
“peace” is a cheap attempt at irony — and Desh (Joey Ansah) do get repetitive, especially if you screen the movies
in sequence without much of a break between them — but for creating a popular
entertainment that shows the national security establishment at its absolute
worst while still creating enough thrills for a mass audience, I give the
makers of The Bourne Ultimatum a
lot of credit. Incidentally, there have been at least two movies in the “Bourne
Universe” made since this one: a film not only co-written but directed by Tony
Gilroy called The Bourne Legacy
(2012) which is described on imdb.com as “an expansion of the universe from
Robert Ludlum’s novels, centered on a new hero whose stakes have been triggered
by the events of the previous three films” said hero being “Aaron Cross” and
played by Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker, and a new film from this year called simply Jason
Bourne in which Matt Damon resumed the
role.
