More Thinky Thoughts on The Bourne Legacy

Aug 13, 2012 08:34

The whole story of Aaron Cross is tragic, TRAGIC I tell you, if you sit down and think about how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. There are layers upon layers in this story. Things to think about long after the lights come up in the theater.

Kenneth Kitson started out as a dumb kid, either orphaned or abandoned, who grew up in a group home. He probably joined the Army because he had nowhere else to go when he turned 18 and aged out of the system. All he wanted was somewhere to belong, but when they accepted him into the Outcome program, there’s no way he could know that he was joining a program that would mean that he NEVER would belong anywhere. Because when you become a spy, you belong absolutely nowhere. You have no friends. You have no family. Falling in love (as Outcome Three did) could get you killed or banished to the ass end of the world. He was better off in the Army, because at least then he had a platoon and a unit to belong to. As a spy he’s got nobody. Just himself.

But he didn’t know that when he signed up. They took the raw material, and made him stronger and smarter. He was put on a daily drug regimen of 250 “greens” (for physical abilities) and 400 “blues” (for mental abilities). And they kept him on a leash by telling him horror stories about the “cognition degrade” that could happen if he goes off his meds. He can’t go rogue, because then how would he get his meds? He can’t defect to another country, because then how would he get his meds? He needs to be loyal, and he needs to perform, in order to get his meds. It’s no wonder he’s so freaked out by the idea of running out of chems. He knows full well what he used to be, and he’s been brainwashed by the Army to Be All that He Can Be. Why would he want to be less than what he is now? Anyone who has read Flowers for Algernon knows exactly what that would look like (And I wouldn’t be surprised if that book was part of the Outcome training.).

The other piece of the puzzle here is the fact that they viraled him off his physical meds, his physical enhancements are locked in and permanent. But they didn’t tell him that. They wanted him to still believe that he’s dependant on chems for those enhancements. And for some reason they haven’t locked in his mental abilities. Were they worried about how they were going to be able to control him without the threat of removing his meds? Because clearly them neglecting to tell him that his physical abilities were now permanent was an effort to keep them on a leash, a leash of chems/meds.

But if you really think about the beginning of the film, that may have been exactly what his handlers intended to happen when they dropped him in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Aaron Cross said that he went off the grid for four days and thought that this assignment might have been punishment for that infraction. And he just might be right, since if you were paying attention (and I was during my second viewing) they dropped him off in the wilderness without sufficient chems to make it to the rendezvous point.

When he tucks his little dog tag medicine kit into his boot before he arrives at the cabin, he has one day’s worth of pills left. But Outcome Three tells him that he’s broken the record for arriving, that he’s TWO DAYS earlier than anyone else has ever made it. So the question is, were his handlers trying to kill him? Were they hoping that if the weather or the wolves didn’t kill him on the journey, that he’d run out of meds, go into cognitive degrade, and then do something stupid to get himself killed? Is that how the program went from nine agents to six? Were they dropped in the wilderness without enough chems to make it back out again? (And why the hell were the wolves tracking him anyways? Conspiracy theories abound!)

The whole question of his mental abilities just fascinates me. There’s a brief scene in the factory, where he pauses on the catwalk and zones out. Marta has to call to him, and when they enter the elevator, you can see on his face that something might be wrong. That he might be starting to degrade?

I think that Aaron’s whole arc in this story was trying to figure out how to keep his new mental abilities. I think once he figured out what they’d given him, he started scheming, trying to figure out how to keep his new brain. It’s pretty clear that he’s given it a lot of thought, and knows quite a bit about the program that produced him.

Even Outcome Three told him “You think too much.”

jeremy renner, movies

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