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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[skwidly.livejournal.com]

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