The Bourne Ultimatum

Saw this with Matt and Travis. Travis never saw the first two and hated it, and Matt saw both the day before and loved it. That I think is the most potent statement I can say about the movie: if you enjoyed the first two, you will enjoy this one, and if you didn't, you will get bored, leave the theatre and call some chick. I will say that I did get a little irritated at the shaky camera shit this time around, not during the fights, but the scenes it wasn't necessary in. Example: the scene where Jason tells Marie's (his girlfriend who got capped in the second movie, more on that later) stepbrother that she is dead. I had trouble keeping my eyes on faces because of that. Listen, the handcam stuff works great in the driving scenes, and if used properly, the fight scenes. But what the fuck, they're sitting in chairs. The shake effect makes the movie feel cheap, not engrossing. It wouldn't even bother me that much if it were slight. It feels like the guy broke his hand and duct taped the camera to it. The action sequences were superb, but then, I'm the type that really gets into this. When I see a good fight, I will usually say, "Oh fuck" or "GODDAMN!" and giggle like a school girl, and I did a lot of that in this movie. There's a scene where Jason's punching a book against some guy's face, and it sounds like his fist is going right through it, and I just leaned back and grinned like an idiot. The second and third movie are like two halves, from what Matt said; there are scenes that feed into each other and the beginning of the third movie I guess meshes up with the end of the second.

The film reflects a lot on the fact that Bourne has had his love interest taken away from him, as much as the second movie did. This shined a light on me for how much I really didn't like that. When I saw the second movie, I thought it was just because I liked her character and she went through too much shit to justify her ten minutes in the second film. Now that I've seen the third one, I pinned down exactly why it bugged me. As the viewer, her character is the one I identify with. Why? Because unlike every other star of the movie, she is literally just a normal person. The original decision she made that cemented her future with Bourne was one I would have made in her position too. While Bourne is by all means a likable character, he represents a world that I'm unfamiliar with outside of fiction, whereas Marie's world is the one I live in every day: she's got bills she's struggling to pay, she could be in a better place if she had made some better decisions, and she's made an offer that few if any in her position would refuse. So the act of killing her in the second movie was more than just killing a character I liked; it was also a message that shouldn't have been sent. By turning the everyman that was really my anchor to this story into a predictable plot element, it alienated me to the rest of the action. It just transforms into another complex CIA movie with a cast of characters I can't relate to in any regard. I love revenge tales, but I like redemption tales more, because growing as an individual is more difficult than killing another, and more compelling to me if done correctly. This is cemented by the fact that Jason over the series reverts back into his whole agent thing completely, not just in actions, but in personality, which is especially sad, as all the progress made in the first movie is more or less discarded.

That is not to say he's a two dimensional character by any means. I noticed thematically that there are a ton of aesthetic similarities to the first one, many echoes if you will of scenes, and how Bourne acts in each of them was something I found very interesting. Pretty much every interaction Bourne has with Nicky Parsons mirrors a scene had with Franka Potente in the first movie. The only difference is how Bourne handles it, which for me at least was quite impressive on Matt Damon's part, because you could see that he noticed the similarities and that it disturbed him, but it's such a subtle thing that if you aren't paying attention you could easily miss it. Take the diner scene in the first with the diner scene in the third. In the first, Bourne is still trying to get his head to stop spinning, and explaining to the only person he knows what exactly he's going through. In the third, he's quietly going through what he has to do with Nicky Parsons. There's no exploration; it's familiar territory that he has to tread again, difficult though it may be. Then there's the hair dying and clipping scene; in the first, this is the scene where the romance between Bourne and Marie is clearly spoken. He personally does the dying and cutting of her hair, and their previously unspoken feelings are consummated. Physically, the two of them are never more than a foot apart, if even that. In the third, Parsons is dying and cutting all her own hair, Bourne doesn't even enter the room until she's almost done, and when he sees that she's done her hair in more or less the same way as Marie's, you can see the twinge of the memory flicker across his face before he quickly exits the room. In the first film, Bourne gives Marie the choice to leave and be safe, and in the end tracks her down and goes to start a life with her; in the third, there is absolutely no discussion about it; he throws her on a bus and tells her she has no role in what he has to do, and there is no indication of him returning to her. Whereas in the first film all the aforementioned scenes serve to bring the characters closer together, in this one they all serve to separate. It's clear that there's some kind of chemistry between Bourne and Parsons, but you can see in his face the reminiscence and immediate desire to escape it. The regular viewer could put two and two together and realize that he's still hurting from his girlfriend, but it's easy to miss the aesthetic triggers for that.

Anyhow, this turned out way longer than I originally intended, and I'm certainly not a scary fact-memorizing fan by any means, I've just had a lot of free time in the past couple days, and chose to spend it critically analyzing some movies.