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The CIA's Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) can also help Bourne

Directed by Paul Greengrass with the same cinema verité realism that he brought to The Bourne Supremacy—and to historical films like Bloody Sunday and United 93—the new film has an immediacy that keeps you fully engaged. The script, by Tony Gilroy (who also worked on the previous Bourne films) Scott Z. Burns (a producer on An Inconvenient Truth) and George Nolfi (The Sentinel), lapses into super-computer fantasy and pedestrian dialogue once in a while, but it's mainly there to provide the bones for the real meat of this film, which is the action scenes, shot by series veteran Oliver Wood with his usual frenetic hand-held urgency and edited by fellow veteran Christopher Rouse in a way that brings perfect order to seeming chaos. John Powell's score keeps things tense as the various characters pursue each other, but what is most striking about the film is how much more intense it becomes when the characters catch up with each other, the music stops, and the fighting begins.

The Bourne Ultimatum is that rare threequel that stands up quite well to the movies that came before it, and it is easily one of the most satisfying action movies of the summer, but it pales somewhat next to its predecessors—and that is mainly because Bourne's humanity recedes into the distance somewhat.

David Straitharn as Noah Vosen, a shady character in the CIA

The first two films revolved around Bourne's relationship with Marie and his memory of that relationship after she is gone, but there is nothing in the third film that humanizes Bourne in quite the same way (though his scenes with Nicky do begin to point in that direction). The climactic scenes here revolve around the interesting question of what it would take to turn a man into a killing machine, and whether one can ever truly submit one's moral compass to the dictates of other people—but Bourne, despite his moral reawakening, remains a machine, capable of meeting any obstacle and surviving any attack (not unlike the Terminator, really).

And the problem is not only that Bourne has fewer friends. The justice he pursues in this film is more institutional in nature, rather than the personal, even restorative justice that he sought in the previous film. The Bourne Supremacy ended with Bourne seeking the daughter of one of his victims, and confessing to her what he had done. The Bourne Ultimatum, on the other hand, is about exposing government secrets and making other branches of the government aware of what is being done in the government's name—all of which makes for a less personal story.

The previous film ended on a note which suggested that Bourne did not need to know his previous life, because he had left that behind and moved on to something better. The new film is more ambiguous. It was David Webb—Bourne's real name, as revealed in the epilogue to Supremacy—who decided to become Bourne. So would it really be a good thing if Bourne became Webb again? On a dramatic level, the previous movie gave us a certain closure, but the new film opens things up again—even as it ends on a note which suggests the franchise is well and truly over—and for this viewer at least, that ambiguity makes the new film a little less enjoyable.

Talk About It

1. Do you think it is ever morally acceptable to kill someone on someone else's orders, even if you do not know why that person is supposed to be killed? How would you compare and contrast Bourne's situation to that of, say, a regular soldier?
2. How does forgetting the past liberate you? Constrict you? What sorts of secrets have you had to uncover or remember in order to make things right?

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