Bourne 4.

[equustel]

There are rumblings.

Shmuger and Linde landed Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon for a fourth "Bourne" movie, even though the director and star seemed ready to wrap it up after three pics.

I am not pleased, nor enthused. I'm nervous.

You see, to my mind, half of what made The Bourne Ultimatum such an accomplishment was the fact that it capped

Comments

[trinityvixen]

Where else is there to go, really?

The Bourne movies were not serialized the way the books were. In the books I've read, you can pretty much pull Jason Bourne into action again through various methods. On film, he's dedicated to avoiding any such revisitation of his past (excepting the third film, though that ended with him once more off the grid). He makes peace with it and moves on to find some kind of lasting stasis (I'd say peace, but I doubt he ever finds that, really).

He's rediscovered who he is on all metaphysical levels at this point. Identity was about the mundane and the macabre--the fact he speaks various languages with a fluency and has a talent for violence. Supremacy was about acceptance and integration--learning to accept consequences and not cutting off the violent side from the emotional one. And Ultimatum was about atonement and correction--fixing the problem of macho ignorance that leads people to make amoral, inhuman decisions out of convenience

[equustel]

I just don't know what all else there is to learn about Jason Bourne that we haven't done.

Precisely. (Great breakdown, btw.) Sigh. I seem to recall Damon commenting that he would not make Supremacy until he was a certain they had a script good enough to one-up the first film. Same deal with Ultimatum. But unless somebody's been sitting on fantastic outline for a fourth, the case here seems to be more a matter of "Universal's throwing a ton of money at us."

The other thing that worries me is that Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter on all three films, appears to have moved onto bigger and better things - he wrote and directed the Oscar-tapped Michael Clayton, and is doing the same for the upcoming Duplicity. At this point, it seems like he's got bigger fish to fry than Bourne 4.

Frell you, Universal. :P

[trinityvixen]

I have yet to meet the fourth of ANYTHING that was any good (note: that doesn't include things of definite length like Harry Potter that have more than three entries, although I do think they should have stopped with three Star Wars). Maybe this summer's Indiana Jones will disprove that, I don't know. But it would take a lot for me to jump back into Bourne again. I liked the third one, but I didn't love it as much as the first two, and it felt like (and was supposed to) the films were getting tired. I dread to think of how dead-beat they'd be for a fourth or how thematically false a faster-paced fourth movie would be.