The Bourne Identity (film)
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Bourne Identity (film)
The Bourne Identity is a 2002 movie based on the book of the same name by Robert Ludlum. The film is loosely based on the novel and adapted by Tony Gilroy. In 2004, The Bourne Identity was followed with a sequel titled The Bourne Supremacy.
Plot
- For the plot of the novel see The Bourne Identity.
The film begins with the body of Jason Bourne, who has two bullet wounds in his back, floating in the Mediterranean Sea. He is picked up by a French fishing ship and nursed back to health; however, Bourne has no idea who he is and knows nothing of his past. A member of the ship, when treating Bourne's wounds, finds a message surgically embedded in Bourne's hip, containing details of a numbered Swiss bank account. When the ship reaches port, Bourne travels to Zürich to learn about his past, hopefully from the items in the mysterious bank account.
During his travels Bourne begins to notice certain characteristics about himself, including the use of martial arts when two Swiss police officers wake him up, and then demand papers, as he is sleeping on a park bench. He also speaks fluent English, French and German. The bank account contains numerous passports from various countries, two of particular interest titled: "Jason Charles Bourne" and "John Michael Kane". It also contains numerous bills of a variety of different currencies and a gun. Bourne takes everything in the container except the gun, but when leaving is flagged by an informant of a black ops arm of the CIA called Treadstone, who is trying to track and locate Jason.
After leaving the bank Bourne notices he is being tailed by Swiss police and loses them by entering the US Embassy using his Jason Bourne passport. However word quickly reaches the consulate that Bourne is a wanted man and the consulate's detachment of Marines attempt to apprehend him. Bourne disarms a Diplomatic Security Service agent and two Marines and flees into the upper levels of the consulate building. There he obtains a radio from another agent and takes an emergency escape map off the wall to guide himself. He proceeds to an exit approximately five stories up where he clings to half inch divots in the stone walls to elude capture and slowly crawls down the side of the consulate.
After Bourne's escape he meets Marie Helena Kreutz (Marie St. Jacques in the novel), a poor gypsy and pays her $20,000 to drive him in her Mini to Paris where Jason Bourne lives. On the drive Bourne admits his amnesia to Marie and ponders his unique abilities with her which now include exceptional climbing and timing. He also suffers headaches when staring into lights (such as during a night drive).
Bourne convinces Marie to join him on his journey of discovery because she is "the only person [he] know[s]." In Paris, it turns out a Building superintendent knows Bourne and shows him to his luxurious apartment. In the apartment Marie uses Bourne's sink to wash herself, as Bourne examines his possessions and thinks that he is in the shipping business. He notices a phone on his desk and presses the redial button. He then learns that his alter ego, John Michael Kane, last stayed at the Hotel Regina, and that he is now supposedly dead from a car accident, with his body now in a morgue in Paris. While Jason continues looking for clues about his past, another Treadstone agent suddenly bursts through a window with a submachine gun and attempts to kill Bourne. Bourne and the assassin (who uses the same fighting technique as Bourne) engage in a hand-to-hand fight, ending with Bourne knocking out the assassin, breaking his leg and arm, and stabbing him with a pen. Before Bourne can extract any information from him, the assassin jumps out the window and falls several stories to his death.
Up to this point a CIA group has tracked Bourne from the bank in Zürich to the Swiss consulate to Marie's car to John Michael Kane's home. Their goal is to kill Bourne, apparently because they feel he has gone rogue. The CIA group is unaware of Bourne's amnesia.
Bourne and Marie travel to the Hotel John Michael Kane stayed at, and Marie obtains copies of his phone bill. Bourne also visits the yacht manufacturer that constructs the yacht John Michael Kane was researching. They also visit the morgue where the body of John Michael Kane is missing. Bourne steals the visitor register and leaves.
It turns out that Bourne was an assassin working for the CIA. He attempted to assassinate former dictator of a small African country (fictional) Nykwana Wombosi on his yacht but failed. Afterwards the CIA tried to cover the assassination up by placing a false body in the morgue but as the body had not been shot, Wombosi wasn't fooled. Note that although Bourne knows he was shot, the CIA hasn't been in direct contact with him and therefore did not know Bourne had been shot on Wombosi's yacht.
When the police discover Marie's car (with her and Bourne in it), Bourne leads them on a car chase through the streets of Paris. They are forced to abandon the car. Hiding out in a hotel, after cutting Marie's hair to change her appearance, Bourne and Marie make love.
Returning by taxi from a fact-finding trip one evening, Bourne and Marie see a large police contingent approaching their hotel. They flee the taxi, and when Marie wonders why they are also after her still, Bourne breaks the window of a parked police car and shows her a dossier showing photos of him and Marie together.
Bourne and Marie flee to the home of Marie's step brother just southeast of Limoges where they stay for the night. The next morning, the step brother's dog is missing and the phoneline is dead. Bourne immediately discerns someone coming after them has arrived, and takes the homeowner's breech-loading shotgun and fires at his detached natural gas tank, using the explosion and smoke as cover as he moves into the woods. He and another Treadstone operative end up hunting each other in a field, where eventually Bourne outwits and shoots the operative, asking him of his identity. The agent gives Bourne more cryptic information, this time indicating there is a different agent in every major European city and that they all get the same headaches.
Bourne splits up with Marie for her safety and tells her to "get as low as you can and stay low." He promises to "end this." Using the dead Treadstone operative's cell phone, he calls into the CIA group monitoring him and forces a meeting at Pont Neuf crossing half of the Seine at Île de la Cité. The meeting is a bust, but Bourne places a detector on a CIA undercover van and uses it to follow Treadstone's head man, Alexander Conklin, to Treadstone's Paris safehouse.
At the safehouse, Bourne disables the security system and sneaks in, forcing a confrontation with Conklin. Bourne easily disarms the man who says Bourne is a "malfunctioning thirty million dollar weapon". Conklin says Bourne is used because he is a specialist at not being seen, due to his non-existent identity.
A flashback then informs viewers that Bourne failed to murder Wombosi because he was surrounded by his children when Bourne came to kill him. As Bourne had already discovered, he'd manufactured the existence of John Michael Kane, picked Wombosi's yacht as the strike point, and set the date himself. Ending the confrontation before a shootout with other agents, Bourne knocks out Conklin and subsequently kills three guards before escaping into Paris.
Conklin himself then leaves the Paris safehouse, and we see alternating camera shots of him and Bourne each with a pistol walking down a dark Paris street...as another Treadstone operative prepares to deal out death. It ends up not being Bourne who gets killed by this agent; the agent instead kills Conklin. It turns out Conklin's boss, Ward Abbott, ordered Conklin be killed as the beginning of a coverup of Treadstone.
Finally, we are transported to Mykonos, where Marie is cleaning up a beachfront store. Bourne walks in and, after he inquires somewhat anonymously if the store is hers, she turns around and he asks if he can rent a scooter. Marie asks him if he has identification, and predictably Bourne replies, "Not really".
They hug and the film ends...with Moby's "Extreme Ways" providing the intro to the end credits.
Jason Bourne
The Bourne Identity is a very tight, intelligent film that may require multiple viewings or the reading of the underlying book to fully comprehend. There are several aspects of the Bourne character that are not fully explored but that point to the whole past and identity of Jason Bourne:
- Along with John Michael Kane, Bourne is shown to have numerous other passports in his Zurich safe deposit box. Among the nations shown include Brazil, Poland, Russia, Canada, and the United States. Since the John Michael Kane persona was generated for a specific assassination it is quite possible that Bourne has made assassinations in the other 8 nations he has passports for. One of these assassinations is explored in The Bourne Supremacy.
- Bourne's apparently compulsive cleaning is further explored in The Bourne Supremacy where we are informed the other Treadstone operatives have the same compulsion. This compulsion undoubtedly derives from their duty to remain unidentified by cleaning all fingerprints and leaving no biological evidence of their presence. However, whether Bourne was taught this compulsion or perhaps selected for this quality is unknown.
- Bourne's uncharacteristicly strong care for children was evidenced both by his failure to kill Nykwana Wombosi when his children were present and again when he almost cries in the presence of Marie's stepbrother's children. Whether Bourne has children, had them and lost them or some other source for this characteristic is not fully explored.
- As a trained assassin we may see that Bourne has humane feelings also during the second film, The Bourne Supremacy. Unlike the novel, Bourne showed his emotional side when he kept at least one photo of Marie after she was killed in India by a Russian secret service agent. Later in the film Bourne refuses to kill an unarmed CIA traitor, saying "She wouldn't want me to".
- In this film we are informed Bourne is not the only Treadstone operative to have headaches. Bourne's headaches are strongly associated with lights in darkness such as while passing traffic at night. It is possible that the Treadstone operatives were brainwashed or hypnotized and the application method was some form of flashing lights which are known to have pervasive effects on the mind.
- The film's title may refer to the part of Jason Bourne that is a well-trained assassin as an independent persona from his genuine self. Bourne's actions during the movie demonstrates the character may have multiple personalities. This is shown multiple times, but perhaps most substantially when Bourne disarms two Swiss police officers early in the movie but when he realizes he is holding a gun and standing over two unconscious policemen seems almost surprised.
- In the underlying book Bourne clearly suffered traumatic amnesia as he was shot in the head. In the film Bourne was not shot in the head and demonstrates the ability, at times, to recover lost memories. Examples include remembering the children on Wombosi's yacht and, in The Bourne Supremacy, remembering yet another assassination. There is therefore some question as to what form of amnesia Bourne may have. Bourne may have traumatic or global amnesia due to the traumatic events on Wombosi's yacht. He may have fugue state resulting from the stressful situation combined with his possible multiple personalities. Or he may have some exotic and unique form of Posthypnotic amnesia derived out of Bourne's former psychological conditioning and his first failure.
- Whether Jason Bourne remains the character's true and final identity is unknown. Although the very end of The Bourne Supremacy indicates Bourne once went by the name David Webb we must wait for The Bourne Ultimatum to learn more.
Cast
- Jason Bourne - Matt Damon
- Marie Helena Kreutz - Franka Potente
- Alexander Conklin - Chris Cooper
- Ward Abbott - Brian Cox
- Nicolette 'Nicky' Parsons - Julia Stiles
- The Professor - Clive Owen
- Nykwana Wombosi - Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
- Danny Zorn - Gabriel Mann
Crew
- Directed by: Doug Liman
- Written by: Robert Ludlum
- Screenplay by: Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron
- Produced by: Robert Ludlum and Frank Marshall
- Composed by: John Powell
- *Additional music by: Paul Oakenfold and Moby
Trivia
- The film features a martial arts technique known as Kali, according to Matt Damon during DVD featurettes.
- Filming took place in Prague, Czech Republic, Paris, France, Imperia, Italy, Rome, Italy, Mykonos, Greece, and Zurich, Switzerland. However, some scenes that were set in Zurich were actually filmed in Prague.[link]
- The Bourne Identity was the first film to be released under the 12A film certificate in the United Kingdom.
- Filmmakers were concerned the movie would be poorly accepted following the September 11, 2001 attacks. An alternate beginning and ending were made but test audiences preferred the original so filmmakers went with it.
- While Bourne leaves the fishing boat in a small town in the French Riviera, he disappears when two men walk in front of him.
- Matt Damon performs almost all of his own stunts in this movie including:
- *Driving a Mini through the streets of Paris (this is the only Bourne stuntwork not done completely by Damon)
- *Taking on guards in the U.S. Consulate in Switzerland
- *Climbing down the consulate wall using minimal handholds (Damon says this was the most difficult stunt according to DVD material)
- *Fighting the assassin in Jason Bourne's Paris apartment
- *Fighting Alexander Conklin and his two guards in the Paris Treadstone Safehouse
- *Climbing the aforementioned building wall
- *A hard fall of over ten feet to the floor of the same building
- A full accounting of Bourne's passports:
- *Jason Charles Bourne (United States)
- *John Michael Kane (United States)
- *Nicholas Lemanissier (France)
- *Paul Kay (Canada)
- *Foma Kiniaev (Russian Federation)
- *Unkown Name could be Joao Do Carmo per green card (signed Gilberto do Piento Consul General) (Brazil)
- *Joad Do Carmo (Green as per the Brazilian passport but of an unknown nationality)
- *Unknown name with Polish Nationality
- *Unknown name and nationality but, presumably, German as per The Bourne Supremacy where Bourne is shown to have assassinated a Russian Politician in a hotel in Berlin. However, as that film indicates this assassination is not in Bourne's official CIA file and therefore may not have been incorporated into Bourne's safe deposit box.
- Approximately thirty minutes into the film Ronin, a firefight breaks out in Paris. Robert De Niro's character looks across the Seine River to see two police vehicles activate their sirens. If you look closely, you will see this is the same spot Jason Bourne spun Marie's Mini and drove against traffic to elude police.
External links
| Jason Bourne | |
|---|---|
| Robert Ludlum novels: | The Bourne Identity (1980) | The Bourne Supremacy (1986) | The Bourne Ultimatum (1990) |
| Eric Van Lustbader novels: | The Bourne Legacy (2004) | The Bourne Trajectory (2007) |
| Matt Damon films: | The Bourne Identity (2002) | The Bourne Supremacy (2004) | The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) |
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.