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

Comments

[sartorias]

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]

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?

[thomasyan]

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]

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.

[inkylj]

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]

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]

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.