Patreon Letter: 23rd July 2019

Hey folks,

Jackson here with another Patreon Letter! Hello! This past week, I watched all the Bourne movies, and now I'm gonna write about them. Hope you enjoy this quick, pretty zoomed out retrospective. 

Spoilers as usual - not just for Bourne films but for a few other blockbusters, so just be aware, but nothing too out there I hope. Alright let's go!

So. The Bourne Identity, right? It's a legitimately fantastic movie. I was kind of surprised by just how good it was on this revisit. It's not just a pretty decent and influential action movie, it's pulling its weight in all the other areas. It's got really good character work, the relationship between Marie and Jason is really good and you get a legitimate sense of warmth between the two of them. Lots of spy movies love to do the thing where the cool guy spy is torn between doing sick murder and the love of a beautiful woman, it is a well worn trope, but it's rare that it feels as earnest as this. Spectre, the last James Bond movie, plays into this in a big way but the relationship feels hollow and constructed. In Bourne, when the movie ends and he walks into Marie's shop, there's a concrete sense that he has done it, he's left The Life behind. 

This should not have surprised me, it's kinda Doug Liman's entire deal. Mr and Mrs Smith, his next movie, is what could be total garbage entirely saved by the charisma of the central relationship. Edge of Tomorrow has literally the exact same ending. And this stuff is the bedrock on which the entire franchise rests, even as they start to forget this, the sense of Bourne as a normal guy, and I don't mean in that he's not a ripped action star, but that Damon's performance and his interactions with Marie really give a sense of a completely normal, empathetic guy reacting to the absolutely batshit amorality of the world of CIA Assassins and being confused by the switch that goes off in his brain when he's in danger. This is basically entirely lost in the sequels - thoough initially with enough self-awareness to make it work. But we'll get to that.

More about Identity first. The portrayal of the CIA is really good, and it's interesting that they were anxious about the film's politics after 9/11 because maybe people will start to believe that political assassinations were good as hell now. Normal world, and all that. There's a really bad alternate ending they shot that does this, that leans into how the world is changing and yes the CIA is evil but You Need Me On That Wall, etc etc. I'm extremely happy they had the confidence to just leave it as is because there's no wink to the audience, Chris Cooper and Brian Cox are totally amoral, self-serving monsters. Bourne spends most of his time killing other Treadstone agents; people exactly like him, completely arbitrary tools set against each other in a battle over nothing other than whether Chris Cooper gets to keep his job. It's good shit. It's honestly just a Metal Gear movie. Kojima was furiously taking notes.

I do briefly want to mention my one gripe with Identity, I hate the flashback that reveals the reason that Bourne lost his memory was that on the job to kill Wombosi he came face to face with.... a CHILD!! And he just couldn't do it, it was too far. It's done for a reason, you need to explain why Bourne hesitated and what went wrong on the mission, but it undercuts the morality of the movie. It makes Bourne being a normal guy horrified by the CIA in the cold light of amnesia so much less powerful if he was already like "no i shall not cross this line!" back in the day. You don't need Bourne to have always been good, it manes it less meaningful that he chooses to be now.

This is one of the things that Supremacy fixes, focusing on a different flashback to a different murder, but the reveal here is that Bourne is that he didn't hesitate, he simply coldly murdered a man and his innocent wife, because Chris Cooper told him to.  This is the self-awareness I mentioned earlier. Bourne is dragged back to the life because he has to be, and he loses Marie because that's how these stories go. It's all building up to his apology to the victim's daughter, which is honestly one of the most uncomfortable and meaningless acts. The movie doesn't have the same grasp on the political stuff as Identity, but it's still mostly fine in this regard, though it - and Ultimatum - don't quite have the courage of their convictions. And honestly, like Metal Gear, it gets stuck in this nebulous space where it can't end itself as cynically as its material deserves, but neither does it have the vision for an ending that can truly work.

Take Joan Allen's character, who is the good CIA agent in the two sequels, and at the start she's kinda naieve and trying to bring in Bourne peacefully, eventually forging an uneasy alliance with him to expose Treadstone. Which they do and the trilogy allows itself the lie of a happy ending, choosing in its final moments to ignore the fact that the CIA does not have the instutional ability to be "fixed" with a nice leak. The later sequels would correct this issue if it wasn't for the fact that they were awful.

So Ultimatum is kind of unsatisfying because there's nothing you can put at the end that can be satisfying, they don't lean into the nihlism of it enough to play that angle, nor do tthey have the imagination to tell a story about what it means to fight the very concept of american foreign policy. But there's good news: it has the best action scenes in the whole series so it's still pretty good. The Waterloo chase is an all timer. The trilogy is mostly pretty good. 

Legacy should have been a slam dunk, a Bourneless Bourne movie is a surprisingly strong concept because it can just be a workplace comedy about the CIA office politics. It's just a few steps removed from The Thick of It, everything goes to shit the second the treadstone files leak. This gives you a great opportunity to tie a bow on the themes that Ultimatum never did, and it has an ending where the new order of the CIA is in place, just as evil as the old one but some petty personal vendettas have been crushed in this game of musical chairs. I tell you it writes itself. 

That's uh, that's not what they did. It's bad.

It's not what they did for Jason Bourne also, which is a legitimately terrible movie that's entirely about the fact that Bourne's dad started Treadstone and then was killed for deciding it was morally bad and didn't want to hurt his son?? Or something?? It sucks, it completely forgets everything good about the films, I think the nail in the coffin is when the asset in this movie is identified as the guy that killed his dad! Oh shit!! Which goes against every shred of integrity these films have had, the idea that any of these assets could be Bourne if they had a bad enough fall to forget everything. These are people turned into tools of war, and instead Bourne is fighting this evil guy who hates him and hates his dad. It sucks.

There's one kicker to mention which is the final scene of Jason Bourne, a totally unsalvagable movie, where they then do try to do the good thing they should have done all along, where the young tech woman at the CIA who Bourne has formed an alliagence with reveals herself to be just as willing to murder Bourne if it's in her interest. Very briefly they grasp that this movie should have been about the rotating surface level politics of american foreign policy, of how the time of gruff cold war men barking orders has passed and now we must hire! more! women! guards! And of course, the actual skeleton remains the same, a new face on the same beast. But it's one beat at the end of a far too long, nigh unwatchable movie that has spit in the face of all those themes. Moby plays, and it's too little too late.

See you all next time!