Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum
This past weekend I had seen The Bourne Ultimatum at the local theater and I thought I would post some of my thoughts. Ultimatum picks up right where Supremacy leaves off so if you’re a fan of the series and have seen the other movies then you will know a little about what’s going on in the beginning. At the same time, it picks up at a weird point; it doesn’t start from the end of Supremacy where Bourne calls Deputy Director Pamela Landy. Instead, it starts immediately following the car chase near the end of the last film.
This threw me off but if you wait they actually integrate him calling Landy later on and you find out something about Bourne’s birth date that was given in Supremacy. I’m not going to give it all away but I thought that was an interesting twist, it’s like they took the sequel which seemingly wasn’t designed to support a another movie and altered the ending without actually changing anything. What’s interesting is that the end of Ultimatum leaves it wide open for a 4th movie, and there are so many unanswered questions.
Just as the other Bourne movies, The Bourne Ultimatum is action packed. In fact, its so action packed that you can get easily confused by the camera work, they seem to rapidly change the point of view in all of the major scenes so you have to watch closely. I really like how the film brought its action to so many places all over Europe and then finally into New York City. The Bourne series has always been totally excellent in capturing the environment in which it takes place, it feels like your right there with them.
As most of my regular readers know, (do I have regular readers?) I’m big into realism in action movies and the Bourne series does a great job of keeping things feasible, Ultimatum definitely doesn’t disappoint. There’s just such good detail put into the movie, like the accurate communication, or the use of technology which overall isn’t bad in terms of comparing to my opinion of “real technology”. I love the scene where they were tracking the ‘asset’ in the car and the GPS software was using Google maps.
The Bourne Ultimatum will introduce a brand new branch of Operation Treadstone called Operation Blackbriar. To me, Blackbriar is just a re-opened form of Treadstone, it’s a continuation of the Treadstone project despite claims that Treadstone was shut down. You will find out more about the history of Treadstone and why Blackbriar was formed in the movie. The movie actually presents a good amount of information about the projects and the training behind it. But why they were formed in the first place? To save American lives.
The movie while presenting new information about what’s going on leaves many questions unanswered. One question which I and Courtney had picked up is what’s going on between Nikki and Bourne? The scene in the restaurant where Bourne asks Nikki why she is helping him… My theory is that perhaps they had a relationship at one time? Before ‘it’ happened. Another question is why Bourne voluntarily signed up for Treadstone, what was his motive? What does he gain? To Save American Lives? What? There’s something missing.
The Bourne Ultimatum delivers another interesting and action packed chapter to the Bourne series. They really did leave it open for another movie, but at the same time maybe they wanted to leave the story open so that the viewers could draw their own conclusions like I’m doing now.
In terms of comparing this movie with the others released this summer, it doesn’t stand out. But I don’t have any significant complaints about it either. It was pretty good and if you’re a fan of the other movies you will enjoy this one.