or, Jason Bourne on this week’s “World’s Scariest Police Chases”!
So I’m watching The Bourne Identity last night and during the big car-chase scene, God help me, I thought I heard Sheriff John Bunnell’s voice in the back of my head:
I also enjoyed the little homage to Run Lola Run they played by having just a trace of bright red color in Franka Potente’s hair right at the beginning.
I saw the movie and really enjoyed it. I liked the fact that Matt Damon played Jason Bourne as a man who didn’t know everything. For example, he looked at a map before driving somewhere. He was astonished when Franka Potente walked out of the bank with the information he wanted, simply by asking for it. He was genuinely concerned with Franka’s well-being; giving her an opportunity to get out of the situation. I also like the fact that he didn’t indiscriminately shoot people. As a result, I was shocked when the Paris landlady was shot. I believe she was maybe the second person killed in the movie, I think.
I haven’t seen it yet, and had no intention to (at least, until I saw it’s getting pretty good reviews) for one simple reason…
Matt Damon looks far too young to be Jason Bourne.
I mean, really. I know it’s not that big a deal, but he just doesn’t work for me.
The movie was okay. They changed too much. Way too much. The ending is incoherent. They should have just taken the book’s plot and made the movie from that.
His passport lists him as having been born in 69, which would make him about 23. This would make Matt Damon about the correct age for the role.
Does this mean I’m 23 not 32?
Well, being born in 1969, and as I’m 32, Bourne would probably be 32 or 33.
I’m just kidding you, No. 6. I assume you just hit those keys in reverse order.
I think Damon looks about that age, doesn’t he? I mean, I’m mistaken often for being 5+ years younger than I am, so there’s a range of looks out there that is believable for that age.
Am I missing something?
I have not read the book, and only saw the movie once, but I would still expect things to make sense.
—Some SPOILERS I suppose, but not as many as the answers to my questions—
It seems to me that there is never any real explanation as to why Jason Bourne is as good at spy stuff as he obviously is. He has a conversation with another supposedly similarily-trained assassin who had unsuccessfully tried to kill him, and they both talk of “headaches.” I had earlier thought that Bourne’s “headaches” were just related to his amnesia, but after this conversation, I’m thinking that there was some sort of “mind control” or “brainwashing training” or some such thing going on, something to do with “Operation Treadmill” or whatever it is, which was never explained, which somehow in Bourne’s case backfired or went wrong or something.
Is this explained more in the book, or am I just making up plots from old sci-fi movies?
Actually, now that I think about it, I did miss something: the very beginning of the movie. I came in as he was on the boat. From reviews I had read saying the movie starts with him being picked up by a boat, to the comments made in the film, etc., I assumed I hadn’t really missed anything important. A flashback kind of showed him about to shoot his target when he saw the guy’s kids and then didn’t go through with it. But is that it? Is that all that was explained or is there more to it that I missed?
When he fails to shoot his target (because of the kids) the target chases him off the yacht and shoots him twice in the back. After that, he’s picked up by the fishing boat.
The operation (I think it was called dread stone) had something to do with mind control and training deadly assassins, but was never really explained in the movie. All we know is the CIA chief lied to Congress about its existence at the end.
I also didn’t read the book, but in the movie it was “Operation Treadstone”. The spook in charge of the project makes a mention that Bourne is a $30 million dollar mistake, so obviously they’ve made a bit of an investment. An interesting movie, made bizarre by the intermittent giggles of women next to me and behind me during the movie. We never figured out what they were laughing about. I liked that he could just spout off German and French, although he didn’t remember the two languages. Plus Damon’s very American accent (in French and German) was kind of quaint. I also liked that the police in the park who first encountered Bourne spoke German with a Swiss accent, nice touch.
FWIW, during the car chase sequence I was reminded of the commercial, not sure if I saw it in the US or not, where they are chasing a crook and he slows down not to scratch some car that he admires, then speeds up again once past it.
OK; I knew all that from watching the movie, so I’m still assuming they didn’t play that scene twice. That means they must not have showed it originally at the very beginning of the movie, and if they did, there’s still no new information here. So I didn’t miss anything?
Did they ever say it “had something to do with mind control,” or are we just extrapolating… interpolating… oh hell, are we just making this stuff up in our need to make logical sense out of what seems to be a good movie until we start thinking about the details afterwards?
Does the book explain this stuff in any more detail?
Well, the book doesn’t deal with mind control, nor does it have the banality of the Treadstone shown in the movie. (It has a Treadstone, just not the ambiguous, unfortunate one the movie threw out at us.) I was never a fan of thrillers, but I did pick up The Bourne Identity at a Goodwill store and thoroughly enjoyed it. (The book, not the store.)
If you get a chance, find a copy of the book; it’s much more interesting than the movie. I understand why the Hollywood-types cut out a lot of the book, but I feel like they took what was fun from the original story and made it into another hackneyed adventure movie.
However, I do agree with medstar about how fun it was for her to get the information just by asking for it. 
The car chase made the movie. And I’m not even a real car-chase fan.
Or maybe I am, since I loved the car chases in Ronin, too
Before posting my complaints and criticisms below, i should say that i did enjoy the movie a lot, and i thought Matt Damon and Franka Potente were both good in their roles.
…SPOILERS…
The great thing about the book was that you got to follow Bourne on a long and circuitous search for his identity, rather than having the whole thing thrown in your lap very early on, as the movie did.
Another difference, and one that will always give a book an advantage over a movie, is that the reader of the book gets inside Bourne’s head, and can follow his confusion and his thought processes as he tries to put the pieces together, rather than simply watching his actions as we are required to do in the movie.
In the book, IIRC (it’s been a while since i read it), Bourne kidnaps his female companion, rather than offering to pay her for driving him around. But the car WAS a mini, like in the movie.
Like some others on this thread, i had also envisioned Bourne as a slightly older man - late thirties or early forties, perhaps.
Perhaps the biggest dissappointment to me was the way they changed the whole operation that he was working on before he lost his memory. I don’t know who came up with that African guy scenario, but it was pretty lame. Part of the attraction of the book was that it was not only the American intelligence services that were after him, but also people in the criminal community attached to the assassin he had been impersonating before his amnesia. His attempts to understand who was who, and why each group wanted him dead made for some of the best reading in the book. And the ending of the book, which takes place at the Treadstone house in New York, is also great.
I was also pretty pissed off when they showed the flashback scene of his attempt to assassinate the African on the boat. The explanation they offered, in which he couldn’t pull the trigger because the man’s kids were there, is the lamest piece of crap i’ve seen for quite a while. The sort of person who blows people’s brains out for a living whether they deserve it or not isn’t going to let a few kids stop him. I think they put this scene there in an effort to convince us that he was already turning into a good guy before his amnesia, rather than just becoming a nice fellow after he lost his memory. Whatever the reason, it sucked.
And while i sort of liked the “technoporn” aspect of the film, with all the whiz-bang computers and stuff, i think i would have preferred it if they had stuck with Ludlum’s time period. His book was set in a period of telegrams and operator-assisted international telephone calls that made the suspense even greater.
On the positive side, i don’t think i’ve ever seen Paris look more impressive in a movie - at least not a recent movie.
I never understand why people get riled when a movie doesn’t follow the book it’s based on.
The book was great. So was the movie, despite the loose end or two. Did the movie follow the book? I don’t care. Did the movie make sense, was it well-acted, and was it entertaining? Yes to all, IMO.
Since nobody has answered the question regarding the identity thing in the book, I’ll do that. There was some brainwashing going on of sorts, but it’s much more than that. The Jason Bourne identity was created and programmed into the mind of the subject, creating a second personality in the same body. When Jason is needed, he is brought out, sent on his mission, then put back to sleep. It’s the perfect solution: a superb agent who always follows orders, yet is easy to hide because he can be put to sleep while the body’s original personality is in charge. A problem occurs when Jason is shot and left for dead in the sea, and the barrier between the two personalities breaks down, leaving the original nice guy personality–the one with morals and such–with the secret agent abilities of the Bourne personality.
They seem to be doing something different with the movie, though exactly what, I don’t know.
Err… well I read the book back in the late 80s when I was in high school. If he was born in 69, then he would have been a teenager when I read the book. So, basically, the movie fudged his age to make it seem ok for Matt Damon to play it.
Personally, I saw Bourne as being around 40 when I read it.
Eh? Actually, I’m not sure that’s what I read in the book. I could be wrong, of course, but I just don’t recall there being a second personality being programmed. Before the amnesia–according to what I had understood as I read the book–an identity of the character was Jason Bourne, but he was consiously aware of Bourne the entire time. In short, it was simply a role he was playing to draw out the assassin. In the second book, he kind of went mentally AWOL and thought he was Jason Bourne for real, but that’s as close as I could reconcile your version with the book(s). Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t see how the year of the book’s publication is relevant to whether Matt Damon is the right age to play a movie character. The movie character is not the book character. Bourne is established as being in his early 30’s (via the passport)in the movie, and I maintain that Matt Damon is appropriate to play that age.
Yes, the age and other details are changed for the purpose of making the movie. The question that should be asked isn’t whether these details are the same as the book, but whether they work in this movie. In the case of Bourne’s age, the question is whether roughly 30 is old enough to have the knowledge and experience Bourne seems to have. To me, it is.
Skip: We obviously differ in our interpretation. It’s never explained explicitly, but I certainly got the impression, especially in the second book that there were two distict personalities residing in that body, and that the Jason Bourne identity was a lot more than just a cover–more like a super effective version of Manchurian Candidate programming.
Having not read the book, I didn’t think about the technology issue in this way, but after reading your comment I agree that the old school technology would have been much more exciting.
One thing that cracked me up was that despite all of the deluxe techo stuff, they still used a map of France with pushpins to track him. Removing myself from the frame of the story, I can see why they did this, because it’s easier to show to the audience with a big map that can be behind the characters rather than continually cutting to a computer screen. But it still made me giggle, especially when they were talking about where in Paris specifically he was, what street he was on, and they were still referencing the map of France.