Each Day, A Film:
January 19th 2012 (Retrospective)
When I first saw The Bourne Identity, a message would scroll across the screen every twenty or so minutes to remind me that it was the property of Universal Pictures Limited, and was not to be sold on.
That was one of the fun inventions PR companies had in the dying days of video; when sending out a screener tape to journalists, include a rolling subtitle, otherwise unscrupulous people might -*gasp*- copy it and sell it on.
I'm not that unscrupulous, and to be honest I was so taken by what was going on in the film that I barely even noticed.
Nowadays, people chat about how The Bourne Identity revolutionised spy filmmaking, taking away the clunk and the special effects and the camp and making something more streamlined and more realist out of it. While this is true, and it's also to be applauded - I'm more likely to rewatch the Bourne trilogy than, say, recent Bond films - it wasn't so much that that entranced me initially - it was the lack of pandering to the audience.
Pandering is not a bad thing - if you have a complicated setup, you need to find a way of explaining it without thrusting it in the audience's face and waggling it about. If you want an example of this problem, you could do no worse than to watch the poker games in Casino Royale; whenever play is taking place, Mathis has to explain what's going on for the members of the audience who don't speak poker. It's not too blatant, but it does get annoying, because while the poker game is high-stakes and could potentially fund a cinematic terrorist organisation for years to come directly out of Britain's pockets, a poker game is difficult to make tense when it comes to cinema.
The Bourne Identity doesn't have any issue with fishing the main character out of the sea with a laser pointer embedded in his soft tissue and no explanation whatsoever at the start of the film.
Plus, it has Walton Goggins. But let's skip past that point for now.
It's difficult to put a finger on precisely what was so impressive about the film at the time, when I was watching it on a TV-video combi in an L-shaped student room by a canal, but if I had to try now I'd like to put it down to a resolute lack of slow-motion sequences.
Case in point; in Paris, when Jason and Marie are just wandering around the alleged apartment, and all seems quiet and creepy, without any warning a machine-gun toting operative swings through a window and a fight ensues. Now, imagine if Zack Snyder directed the same scene; imagine if ramping had come in just before the glass broke, and each fragment could be seen slowly dropping as the machine gun was raised and the bullets came out in a concussive burst of flame slowly, one-by-one-by-one and then suddenly time speeds up again --
Cool, no?
Not in this case. The fight scene that follows is quick, deadly, and brutal, and basically serves to show how "real" ultra-conditioned, perfectly trained human weapons would fight; trying to find gaps in each other's defenses, using any weapons to hand - including a bic biro, which in a Bond film would inevitably lead to "the pen is mightier than the sword" jokes - and then, suddenly, assassin suicide.
And this is only a mid-point in the film.
This kind of amazed me at the time, because it was well-done; no gadgets, no amazingly large weapons, no quips, no silliness, no camp. Just someone fighting to find out who they are before government operatives shoot them through the head. Shady government operatives, to boot.
Plus Clive Owen.
Now let's be honest, Clive Owen is an interesting case, because post The Croupier, things changed in a large way; supporting role in Bourne followed by Hollywood success but, crucially, he was never the groomed replacement for Bond people thought he was. If you're like me, you can picture Clive Owen as a Dalton-esque, cruel Bond, just right for the post-Pierce Brosnan camp of Die Another Day; a return to first principles.
Instead, we got King Arthur, Shoot-Em-Up, The International... The list kind of goes on.
And Bond was re-invented to be more down-to-earth and, frankly, more Bourne-a-like.
But for a while - before the third film, but after the second, arguably - the Bourne films were an entirely new proposition. That proposition was basically "One Man being Fucked With by Shadowy Government Agencies". Literally; without his memory, Jason Bourne became everyman, albeit an amnesiac everyman trained to be the perfect spy, in a perpetual state of identity confusion, not wanting to be who he was trained to be.
I'm babbling a little, I freely admit, but at the time The Bourne Identity was one of the most amazing films I'd seen in a while, even with the Universal message occasionally popping up at the bottom of the screen. It was the opposite of almost every spy film of the recent years up to that point; quiet when others were loud, humble when others were brash, and it wasn't afraid to just go with the general flow when it was necessary. Witness a Shotgun versus Sniper Rifle battle:
Granted, the "Movieclips" brand cuts that clip annoyingly short, but you get the picture. In HD, no less.
Another thing; the series isn't afraid of continuity; the third film makes some wonderful references to the first, which I'll talk about at another time.
The main thing is, though, that after the second film, it was established that Bourne has a Theme. And that theme? Well, it's this. So now you know.
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