Eoraptor1
September 6th, 2012, 17:27
I did finally get to see The Bourne Legacy, as I intended to do much earlier. Short Review: More of the same.
Jason Bourne/Matt Damon does not appear in this movie. I remember when the Bourne Ultimatum came out him being asked if he would do another sequel, and his reply being "we’d have to call it The Bourne Redundancy". That will be the principal complaint about this film; that it’s more of the same, but without Matt Damon. Jeremy Renner does a good job as Aaron Cross, the super-assassin protagonist of this film, but I’m afraid he’s going to be considered Jason Jr. and not judged on his own merits. The next generation black ops "assets" have artificially enhanced reflexes, stamina, and situational awareness due to what was (as far as I was able to ascertain) some sort of gene therapy, which requires a diligent drug and blood-screening regimen. Bourne’s program was called Operation Treadstone, and the assassins sent after him in The Bourne Ultimatum were from the second generation, Operation Blackbriar. Renner’s generation of operators are Operation Outcome. In the beginning of the film Jason Bourne is still on the loose in NYC, and the nervous black ops community takes drastic steps to avoid criminal prosecution over their extra-legal activities, which - you guessed it - involves issuing their own version of Order 66 against the members of Operation Outcome, including physician Rachel Weisz, whose character becomes very important because she helps Cross deal with his transition away the super drugs, and also because it's near compulsory in these things that the hero have au uberhottie with whom to face danger. In fact, this whole movie could be described as the CYA following the event of The Bourne Ultimatum. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said upon his retirement that having viewed hundreds of pages of classified documents throughout, 90% of them were pure CYA. I’d have liked to have known where he got that figure from (I’m touchy about the way politicians and their media spear carriers use statistics) and I did write him once, but he never answered me. I suppose he was busy.
Some of the concepts in the movie were handled, at least in my opinion, in much more interesting fashion in Limitless. If there were a drug that allowed a person to function longer and more efficiently, think more clearly, and with greater physical ability, could anyone afford not to be addicted? I also found myself thinking quite often of Three Days of the Condor, but apart from this my dominant sense was that Matt Damon had been correct; this was mainly more of the same. The Bourne universe was created by espionage action writer Robert Ludlum, and taken up later by Eric von Lustbader, who became a star of the genre after writing The Ninja, which I’m still astonished was never made into a film series. I read the novel, The Bourne Legacy, while in the hospital, and was curious about how the creators of the film series would transition the story to the screen. The original trilogy updated the story so as to place it in a contemporary setting, and contained some significant changes to the source material. One character in particular, who is killed in the movies, survives to become an important recurring character in the novels. The film version of The Bourne Legacy separates itself even more from the novel. It has very little in common with the book other than the name, but the same thing could be said about the filmed version of The Spy Who Loved Me. I’ve read that Ian Fleming didn’t particularly care for the story, but I thought it was quite interesting if for no other reason than it’s the only Bond story told from the point of view of the Bond Girl.
The trailers preceding the film included a preview for the upcoming remake of Red Dawn. Now, this was a film in the 1980s I enjoyed way too much for my own good, but whose premise I never believed for an instant. I never believed the USSR was logistically capable of pushing an army group across the Bering Straits unimpeded. Never mind that the boomer fleet and Strategic Air Command seemed to evaporate, and as I’m certain was said at the time, if everyone in Texas peed, they’d drown the Nicaraguan army. In this new version, some sort of electromagnetic weapon is being used, knocking out power sources, although I have trouble calling it exactly new, having seen The Matrix, multiple episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and previews for NBC’s Fall series Revolution. I wasn’t clear from the trailer on who exactly the Enemy will be in this new version, although the ones I saw appeared to be Asian. I’m not certain who this could be other than North Korea, and I believe them pushing an army across the straits even less than the old Soviet Union. For better or worse we and China are now superglued economically. Maybe I just think too much about these things, but we saw last summer how adversely an economic crisis in Greece affected the world economy. Imagine what it would do to the world if the United States simply disappeared as an economic entity. I’m curious to see how the film makers will set this story up, or if they even bother, which doesn’t guarantee I’ll go see it. I probably will want to see Judge Dredd, because I’m a nerd, and I didn’t particularly care from the Sylvester Stallone/John Scheinder version. The one I’m really looking forward to seeing is 007's newest outing, Skyfall.
See you at the movies,
JAMES
Jason Bourne/Matt Damon does not appear in this movie. I remember when the Bourne Ultimatum came out him being asked if he would do another sequel, and his reply being "we’d have to call it The Bourne Redundancy". That will be the principal complaint about this film; that it’s more of the same, but without Matt Damon. Jeremy Renner does a good job as Aaron Cross, the super-assassin protagonist of this film, but I’m afraid he’s going to be considered Jason Jr. and not judged on his own merits. The next generation black ops "assets" have artificially enhanced reflexes, stamina, and situational awareness due to what was (as far as I was able to ascertain) some sort of gene therapy, which requires a diligent drug and blood-screening regimen. Bourne’s program was called Operation Treadstone, and the assassins sent after him in The Bourne Ultimatum were from the second generation, Operation Blackbriar. Renner’s generation of operators are Operation Outcome. In the beginning of the film Jason Bourne is still on the loose in NYC, and the nervous black ops community takes drastic steps to avoid criminal prosecution over their extra-legal activities, which - you guessed it - involves issuing their own version of Order 66 against the members of Operation Outcome, including physician Rachel Weisz, whose character becomes very important because she helps Cross deal with his transition away the super drugs, and also because it's near compulsory in these things that the hero have au uberhottie with whom to face danger. In fact, this whole movie could be described as the CYA following the event of The Bourne Ultimatum. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said upon his retirement that having viewed hundreds of pages of classified documents throughout, 90% of them were pure CYA. I’d have liked to have known where he got that figure from (I’m touchy about the way politicians and their media spear carriers use statistics) and I did write him once, but he never answered me. I suppose he was busy.
Some of the concepts in the movie were handled, at least in my opinion, in much more interesting fashion in Limitless. If there were a drug that allowed a person to function longer and more efficiently, think more clearly, and with greater physical ability, could anyone afford not to be addicted? I also found myself thinking quite often of Three Days of the Condor, but apart from this my dominant sense was that Matt Damon had been correct; this was mainly more of the same. The Bourne universe was created by espionage action writer Robert Ludlum, and taken up later by Eric von Lustbader, who became a star of the genre after writing The Ninja, which I’m still astonished was never made into a film series. I read the novel, The Bourne Legacy, while in the hospital, and was curious about how the creators of the film series would transition the story to the screen. The original trilogy updated the story so as to place it in a contemporary setting, and contained some significant changes to the source material. One character in particular, who is killed in the movies, survives to become an important recurring character in the novels. The film version of The Bourne Legacy separates itself even more from the novel. It has very little in common with the book other than the name, but the same thing could be said about the filmed version of The Spy Who Loved Me. I’ve read that Ian Fleming didn’t particularly care for the story, but I thought it was quite interesting if for no other reason than it’s the only Bond story told from the point of view of the Bond Girl.
The trailers preceding the film included a preview for the upcoming remake of Red Dawn. Now, this was a film in the 1980s I enjoyed way too much for my own good, but whose premise I never believed for an instant. I never believed the USSR was logistically capable of pushing an army group across the Bering Straits unimpeded. Never mind that the boomer fleet and Strategic Air Command seemed to evaporate, and as I’m certain was said at the time, if everyone in Texas peed, they’d drown the Nicaraguan army. In this new version, some sort of electromagnetic weapon is being used, knocking out power sources, although I have trouble calling it exactly new, having seen The Matrix, multiple episodes of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and previews for NBC’s Fall series Revolution. I wasn’t clear from the trailer on who exactly the Enemy will be in this new version, although the ones I saw appeared to be Asian. I’m not certain who this could be other than North Korea, and I believe them pushing an army across the straits even less than the old Soviet Union. For better or worse we and China are now superglued economically. Maybe I just think too much about these things, but we saw last summer how adversely an economic crisis in Greece affected the world economy. Imagine what it would do to the world if the United States simply disappeared as an economic entity. I’m curious to see how the film makers will set this story up, or if they even bother, which doesn’t guarantee I’ll go see it. I probably will want to see Judge Dredd, because I’m a nerd, and I didn’t particularly care from the Sylvester Stallone/John Scheinder version. The one I’m really looking forward to seeing is 007's newest outing, Skyfall.
See you at the movies,
JAMES