The Bourne Ultimatum

[kate_nepveu]

Important things to know about The Bourne Ultimatum:

• If the second movie made you motion-sick, this one will too. Though less so, for me.
• There is an elderly white man with a full face and glasses in this movie. Though he strongly resembles Brian Cox, who was in the first two movies, they are not the same person.
• The characters of Pamela Landy and Noah Vosen (new to this movie) both have henchmen with pale skin and very short dark hair. Though the henchmen strongly resemble each other, they are not the same person.

  (Seriously, both Chad and I thought they were and it was going to be a plot point. Did no-one involved in the movie notice this? Movie-makers, if you wanted to make a point by having all of the office-types in the CIA white (and maybe you did), at least give them different hair colors or something.)

  (Speaking of which, I'm aware that many comments have come in on the defaults post while I was running errands, working on other things, and having dinner and a movie. No-one wants me to answer them while I'm motion-sick, however, I assure you.)

• The movie picks up immediately after the close of the main action of Supremacy and incorporates the coda within its body.
• Yes, there are lots of exciting action scenes, and Bourne is still just that cool.

The rest is spoilery and behind the cut.

I was a bit confused about the timeline, at first, because of the coda to Supremacy. (And didn't that show Bourne on a rooftop, not inside a building?)

I think that contributed to my feeling up to the big reveal, that the movie wasn't getting very far: we already knew that he had been born under originally had another name, and that Bad Things had been done to him.

And then the big reveal was lame. Bourne had to be tortured into becoming an assassin? So . . . none of it was really his fault, oh, how nice.

How much more interesting would it have been if he'd agreed, known what he was getting into and consented (I mean, how could he have thought otherwise? the world couldn't have been so much less cynical those few years ago), and then gradually came to change his mind? Wouldn't that have been much more realistic, gripping, engaging?

At the point where he regains his memories, I just shut off. Yes, Vosen should have shot Landry anyway; yes, the agency should have been able to hush it up; yes, it's not really going to root out the problems. It's all part of the little fantasy-land that the movie has slid into, and I don't mean that in a good way, either.

I've said that the first two movies were about the consequences of violence. This one ducks the consequences by removing responsibility. The hints of present-day political commentary don't change that (and might even be made less effective thereby; I'm not sure).

I do at least appreciate that the movie did not throw Bourne and Nicky Parsons together, unsubtle hair-dying-parallel and all. Am I supposed to understand why Nicky was helping Bourne, besides generalized good vibes towards someone who looks like Matt Damon and didn't kill her when he could have?

Anyway. Exciting movie, lame ending, and now my motion-sick self is off to bed.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Interesting.




SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER





I got a different feel off the ending--but then of course I'm the original brick head when it comes to subtlety. Especially when I couldn't watch a good part of the first half because of that damn steadicam. (My son got a ferocious headache, so it wasn't just age.)

But what I got when Bourne regained his memory and name is that he =hadn't= been done to, he'd chosen that life, and then compartmentalized, shortly after he shot that first guy, and they pulled off the mask, and there was a dead guy his own age. And he had to accept that he'd chosen that life, and suppressed the choice. That he chose to perform his first kill, and after that, he shifted into Jason Bourne.

I liked the rest of the ending because the whole thing is a fantasy-land...one guy can't take out that many men, can't survive a car wreck and get up and run across rooftops, and most of all, criminals high up just never seem to be brought to justice.

It was a fantasy in action-land.

[kate_nepveu]

Obviously, I see it completely differently. There are flashbacks showing him being tortured, setting up a big mystery about why he's being tortured, and then it turns out he's being tortured to make him kill. He chose to join, and then *changed his mind* when he knew what it would involve, and then had to be tortured into doing it. Otherwise, why bother torturing him?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Because he didn't know he was signing up for behavior mods, which is supposedly illegal, and we were supposed to see the conflict in the otherwise automiton "asset" there on the roof at the end. That one and Desh were like machines--like Bourne was at the beginning.

I still don't believe I'm right--I'm always the last on the block to see the obvious--but this was the chain of events that linked up to make sense out of that jiggle-wiggle for me as I walked out the door, rubbing my eyes.

[kate_nepveu]

If the reveal at the end of the torture had been something else, I might agree; but the reveal was the killing, and that's where I get stuck.

And yes to rubbing eyes!

Oh, and apparently the credits music was the same in the last two movies? Lame or cool?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I recognized the music immediately, this time.

I tell you why I think he didn't know what he was getting into, and compartmentalized so shizophrenically (the way he was supposed to) I think it was extrapolated from the old Navy Seal kill training, which my brother undertook way, way back. He'd gone into the Navy, got selected out for the Seals, and loved the phyiscal training--he was all "bring it on!" he'd been in such incredible shape, after surfing giant waves in Hawaii for years. But the next level, the kill training was, something else again--he was so traumatized he went AWOL, and when they got him back, did went AWOL again, and though they mustered him out in a very humane way, that was when he starting hitting the heavy drugs.
So that knowledge has most likely shaped my own logic chain.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

That sort of event in your past (I mean, having your brother have a history like that) is certainly going to shape your reaction to any fictional depiction of anything like it.

I have no opinion as to the interpretation of this movie's plot; I haven't seen it nor its predecessors and am not going to, so I don't care about spoilers.

[kate_nepveu]

I'm very sorry to hear about your brother's experiences.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, it was nearly 30 years ago, now--but it did color what I think of what kill training is and what it can do to the mind.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I wondered if that meant they had had a romantic relationship. Anyway, I guess this movie made a point of allowing him to save the chick this time.

[kate_nepveu]

I just figured that she was involved in his training. If they'd been involved sometime before he lost his memory at the start of the first movie . . . well, I'd have to retcon all their interactions, which to this point never gave a hint of it, and I refuse to do that.

[skwidly.livejournal.com]

A relationship between the two of them, in Paris, prior to the first movie, was the obvious implication to both my girlfriend and I, watching this yesterday. It even makes sense...they were based out of the same city, their ages are close, and they're the only people who can talk to each other about what they do. It might not have been a terribly serious emotional relationship (almost couldn't have been, given Bourne's psychological condition), but the indication that they were closer than just co-workers is crystal clear, IMO.

[kate_nepveu]

Enh. If I'm going to be forced to recton two and a half movies' worth of interactions, I want (1) an explicit statement to that effect and (2) for it to _matter_.

But I apparently am in the minority about this movie on this ground too.

[inkylj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my read was also that the reveal for him was realizing that he'd agreed to it all, and willingly and knowingly agreed to be used like a puppet. Hence the scene where he talks to the other assassin on the roof and says, "dude, do you have any idea why you're killing me, besides that someone told you to?"

The cellphones the assassins carry, where you just send them a text message with a picture and they kill that person, are the ultimate expression of this kind of abdication of moral evaluation, seems like.

[kate_nepveu]

As I said to sartorias, I read the reveal differently, and I think the scene on the roof is perfectly consistent with that, because it doesn't matter how he became a puppet to want to stop and to get other people to stop.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Re: ending: I had the same impression as Sherwood-- that the reveal was that he had knowingly chosen to become what he was. I'm not saying it was a terribly deep moral message, though.

Re: shakycam: BARF. It made me very seasick, and should be banned.

Re: pale, dark-haired henchmen: There were two of them? Doh! That reminds me of how I spent two-thirds of The Thin Red Line thinking that two soldiers were the same guy, until one of them was killed and then the other re-appeared in the next scene. (I don't think that's spoilery, since one expects soldiers to die in a war movie.)

[kate_nepveu]

See my response to Sherwood on the reveal.

And yeah, there *were* two, otherwise certain small bits of the plot don't make sense and indeed look like red herrings. =>

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I'd pretty much given up on this anyway, but your comments put the nail in it.

Have you seen the first film adaptation of The Bourne Identity, with Richard Chamberlain ? It worked a lot better than the Matt Damon one for me because it kept what I thought was the best aspect of the book, having Bourne genuinely not know whether he was a covert-ops intelligence type or one of the terrorists they were after in a situation where both sides are shooting at him.

[kate_nepveu]

I haven't. That would be good, but I think after these, Richard Chamberlain might strain my disbelief.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I actually thought the movie was strongly leaning towards Bourne having much more responsibility regarding the killer he had become than simply being forced/duped/brainwashed into it. There were places where he could have said, "No" and instead he said "Yes" and picked up the gun.

Thankfully the shakycam was slightly less than it was in the second movie, where it did make me ill - here it was bothersome but thankfully didn't give me a headache.

I love Pam Landy with much lurve.

[kate_nepveu]

Care to elaborate about the places he said "yes"?

And yes, Pamela Landy is awesome.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

The biggest one for me is when he shot the man. He was capable enough to question what the person had done, why he was being asked to kill this person, but despite some obvious lingering moral qualms, he fired anyway.

Bourne was obviously a victim in many ways, but I don't think we were supposed to excuse him entirely for his actions - and I think Bourne's guilt and desire to apologise to the family of his victims is one indication of that.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks. I'm still stuck on the "but they had to torture him into doing it!", but now I'm repeating myself. =>

[mikeda.livejournal.com]

Though the henchmen strongly resemble each other, they are not the same person.

They're setting the stage for the Bourne/Star Wars crossover.

These are the Clone soldiers, version 1.0...

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Movies where characters might be confused unintentionally by the audience are a bear.

In A Scanner Darkly there is a character called Fred, and a character named Charles Freck, called Freck.

Don't tell me that this won't confuse a lot of viewers who haven't read the book.

On the other hand, possibly that film had no viewers who hadn't read the book.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the book.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read the book, and it didn't confuse me at all.

[skwidly.livejournal.com]

I am apparently the only person on Earth who is completely unphased by shaky-cam.