August5
I think it’s best if you watch the previous movies in the Bourne series to fully enjoy the latest installment. In the first movie, Jason Bourne meets a nice woman. By the second movie she dies. In the third movie he’s again searching for how he became an assassin but also now who killed his girlfriend. At the end of the second movie, the last scene shows Jason in New York peering into Pamela Landy’s office from another high rise building. Pamela Landy is one of the high-ranking people trying to find and kill Bourne.
The third installment, Bourne Ultimatum, does not start in New York. The movie goes through the sequence of events that brought him to New York. Will there be more Bourne movies? Likely, it’s been a successful series so far and there are still more Bourne novels to bring into film. Matt Damon has made statements crediting the Bourne series for saving his career but he’s also made statements that three may be enough for him. The Bourne series features real live locations throughout the world, little reliance on special effects, lots of stunts, car chases, etc. It’s not as glamorous as the Bond series and more realistic than the Mission Impossible series.
Bourne Ultimatum is the last big movie this summer. I saw the previews for upcoming big movies this winter and they all seemed either traumatic or Potteresque. The trauma movies feature lots of violence but not so much the thrilling stuff, more hostage, kidnap, mysterious deaths with family members or close colleagues. The Potteresque movies are all about young adults or children becoming aware of and saving secret worlds. I hate when Hollywood gets into its redundancy spells. They find a formula for a box office hit and they release more and more similar movies faster and faster until they’ve exhausted all known solutions while each solution is lower and lower from the global maximum.