the bourne ultimatum, or david strathairn celebration hour
jesus christ, that's waterloo station!
Let me paint you guys a picture.
It’s August 2007, I think, though I’m just using the release date for reference. It’s a cinema… somewhere. Maybe Watford, but it could also be London. I’m pretty sure I’m with my dad and brother, but that’s an assumption. Point is, I’m watching The Bourne Ultimatum, and it’s…
Memory is a tricky little bastard, huh? I was eight years old at this time, and my recollection is fuzzy. It’s not specific, and it’s certainly not time-based. It’s a grab bag of sounds and thoughts and experiences, randomly scattered across my subconscious. I don’t know what it’s like for you guys, but my solid, traceable memory doesn’t really kick in until age ten or eleven onwards. Before then, it’s potluck. Swiss cheese. Choose your metaphor.
See, I don’t remember watching The Bourne Ultimatum.
I don’t even remember watching the other personally formative movie from the summer of 2007 in the cinema. Of course, I mean The Simpsons Movie, whose DVD I protected with my life, and which I watched about ten times at home. I couldn’t tell you my first thoughts upon seeing Spider-Pig. Nor Spider-Man 3 or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I also definitely watched.
You know what I do remember, in the fuzziest possible terms? Fucking Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.
Memory is a cruel thief, not just for what he takes, but also for what he restores.
Welcome to The Bourne Ultimatum. I don’t remember watching it for the first time, but that’s okay.
Shall we discuss The Simpsons Movie for a moment?
I was genuinely astonished to find out in retrospect that The Simpsons Movie had a relatively mediocre reputation amongst fans. To me, this was canonical. This was not only the peak of The Simpsons, but the peak of comedy itself. This movie is foundational to my sense of humour, and frankly my sense of self. Its jokes are seared onto the surface of my brain as if they were ironed there.
The Simpsons Movie taught me things. It taught me about Alaska. It taught me about the EPA. It taught be that Arnold Schwarzenegger had had a political career. It taught me the phrase “between a rock and a hard place”. You know what? I don’t feel ashamed to say that The Simpsons Movie taught me how to be a man.
The obsession I had with The Simpsons Movie around this time, I cannot convey. It was all-encompassing. It extended beyond the movie and into The Simpsons Game, a completely unrelated video game also released in 2007. I played the shit out of The Simpsons Game. I often think about how the game ends with you going to heaven to fight God in a boss battle that’s a dance-off set to “Rock You Like a Hurricane”. If you didn’t know that, now you do.
None of this is overly relevant to The Bourne Ultimatum, except in the sense that we’re worldbuilding. The world in question being my eight-year-old brain and its already flourishing capacity for hyperfixation on pop culture.
So, look. Jason Bourne. We’re here, and we’re starting in the middle. How very Christopher Nolan of me. Really, though, I couldn’t think of doing this any other way. The Bourne Ultimatum was my way in to all of this. Not the right way in, mind, but mine.
Why did I see this one first? I don’t know. Well, practically speaking, I do know - Identity and Supremacy came out in ‘02 and ‘04 respectively, at which point I was three and five and where they would probably have given me lasting brain damage. Ultimatum hit just the right spot in my burgeoning cinephilia for babies. I was capable of understanding little of the Bush-era politics or intricate conspiracies of the movie, but I could, at least, process it all from pure sound-and-colour input.
The question I’m asking myself is “why did I see this one first given it was the last in a trilogy and I had neither seen nor expressed interest in the series before?” The answer to that one, predictably, is that I don’t fucking know. I cannot tell you. The answer is lost to the wind. I also can’t explain to you why I saw Avatar with my dad and brother, who, respectively, do not care about and loathe science fiction. These things just happen.
(I did extend an invite that was only partially a joke to my dad to come and see The Way of Water, for old time’s sake. He said no, which I respect.)
I think the fun of doing the series this way, in this Machete Cut around-and-back route we’ve made (it’s 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, just to remind you), is that it traces my memories from almost impenetrable haziness to high-definition sharpness. In this order, I remember my experience of watching each film just a little better.
Perhaps I’m going on about it a little, but I am fascinated by the inconsistency of memory, the way we choose moments to preserve without realising we have chosen them. I am fascinated that The Bourne Ultimatum is a pivotal film in my life. Even when we’re pressing down on the breakable fabric of an eight year old’s degraded memories, I think this reflects positively of the human brain. We got some things right with evolution.
A film I do remember watching from 2007 was Shrek the Third. Even my easily-tickled bleep-bloop eight year old attention span could smell a rat here. Shrek 2 is a seminal sequel, but Shrek the Third is dogshit. I knew it. You know it, too. Don’t convince yourself otherwise. Don’t let your nostalgia drug you to the point of insensibility. It’s okay to let go of childish things. Fuck Shrek the Third. Fuck that they made another one afterwards. I didn’t even see that one. I haven’t seen it since. I never will.
That makes me free.
I know two things that made a major impact on me when I first watched The Bourne Ultimatum: the use of The Guardian as a major plot point, and the set-piece set in Waterloo station.
I recognised The Guardian because it’s the paper my parents bought (and still buy) regularly. At that time, I did not have the complicated relationship with the newspaper that I have these days. In 2007, I mainly just liked reading The Guide. I would always pinch it out of the Saturday paper the moment it landed on the kitchen table.
The Guide was a glossy Saturday pullout section in A5 that was mainly about various cultural goings-on - it’s where Charlie Brooker’s TV columns lived for a while. I was mainly just interested in the TV listings, but in retrospect, it was my first exposure to real culture journalism. Yes. Indeed. This newsletter is directly the fault of The Guide.
They discontinued The Guide years ago now. It’s a newsletter these days. Of fucking course it is.
Meanwhile, Waterloo. I can’t actually say that Waterloo, specifically, really meant much to me. I’m a north (of) London boy at heart, and a terminus station south of the river has rarely ever had much use to me. I think I just recognised it as a British train station, and therefore made the exciting connection that Jason Bourne could be there next time I schlepped into Euston with my parents on the weekend.
I have never met Jason Bourne in Euston station. Nothing nice ever happens in Euston station.
I went to Madrid a couple of weeks ago.
I had been there a few times with my parents, who love Spain, but not for several years. The last time I visited, I believe, I was 17. It was the summer before my final year of school, before the election of Trump. One month after Brexit. Which is all to say, a while ago.
I had a fairly good memory of the city, as repeat visits will tend to inform, but it didn’t feel complete. I had always been guided around by my parents, uncertain of where everything was, leaving the plan up to them. I have never been the most active participant in holiday planning. I’m a lazy bitch.
So, with about Europe at my feet and a wealth of cities yet unexplored, I decided to go back on my own. I have, as you probably know by this point, an embarrassing weakness for nostalgia that shames me. It’s nice to go somewhere I have been before. But I also didn’t want just to repeat what I had done before. In fact, I knew by going on my own, seven years on from the last time, anything I did would be different, naturally - the way I saw the place, the way I moved around it, the things I chose to do (lots of reading in bars, for the record). Time brought change.
What I wanted, I guess, was to add to the existing layer of memory, something that suited where I was at today. A new version of the city influenced by everything I could perceive about it today that I couldn’t then. That version of Madrid - 2023-Madrid if you like - can coexist with 2016-Madrid, or 2010-Madrid. They’re different shapes of the same thing. One of them, alone, doesn’t teach you a great deal, but all of them in totality might get a little closer.
Anyway, I watched The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time in years. Ahem.
My eight year old’s memory of the film - or 2007-Ultimatum, if we’re keeping with the metaphor - is quite simple. It’s mostly focused around recognising stuff like the Guardian and Waterloo and enjoying how cool the action scenes were. I grasped the basic outlines of the plot, that there was a guy who had lost his memory who was looking to get it back and that all the men in suits hated him, but probably not much more. Bearing in mind I hadn’t even seen the previous two films, I think this was fair.
There are versions in between - most obviously, when I circled back and watched the first two (I have an oddly sharp sense memory of the “ohhhh” moment when I saw that the beginning of Ultimatum directly leads on from Supremacy), understanding how the story worked as a trilogy rather than this odd out of context punchfest, but 2007-Ultimatum is the most vivid for me, however blurry the actual details of my viewing experience were. It’s the stick against which I measured it this time.
Obviously - and we’ll get there, surveillance state critique fans, hold your horses - The Bourne Ultimatum plays differently with a little historical context and political awareness. What stuck out to me, though, is how much 2007-Ultimatum remained in my sixteen-years-later revisit. So much of this movie - and the whole rapid-fire, Euro-adventuring, airport paperback paranoia vibe of the original trilogy - plays on my lizard brain like piano keys. This is not a dumb movie, especially by action blockbuster standards, but there was a surprising ability of it to wash away my capacity for “intelligent” “analysis” and take me back to that pure-sense state of being a kid.
I think I cherished that experience - and am cherishing it now, writing this, remembering it - because of how little it happens these days. I approach a lot of movies these days like a video essayist taking notes. My brain jumps to themes, ideas, construction. It breaks down how good I think something is scene by scene. It is constantly searching for articulable interpretation. God help me, but I’m often thinking about my Letterboxd star rating throughout as if it’s the fucking live New York Times election needle.
There are benefits to viewing movies this way. My understanding of cinematic language and techniques is still of the toilet, but it’s better. Ditto for my film history. I watch enough stupid movies in the cinema - The Flash day one, for my sins - that it feels right to engage my brain and genuinely respect the films that are worthy of it. I am of the toilet, as a film critic, but I would like to not always be so.
Still, I do feel like I’m missing something sometimes. Overthinking has robbed me of many opportunities in life, often fun ones, and I think that includes enjoying art on a less strenuously over-intellectual basis. After all, much of the time, all that overthinking comes from worry. Am I smart enough? Am I thinking deeply about this enough? Will my opinion be interesting enough? It’s the kind of mentality that makes people angry for no good reason at Letterboxd users who make joke reviews.
(Shoutout to Letterboxd user yajpeg. The best to do it.)
An eight year old kid watching The Bourne Ultimatum does not worry about these things. He doesn’t even know what Letterboxd is. He’s just having a good time, in the only way he can, at a fun movie. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that. Nobody expects any more of him than that.
It’s sad too, in a way. I’ll never be able to watch a movie in that way again. The best I can do - and that’s rare enough - is to remember just a little impression of how it might have felt.
Look at this guy. I love this fucking guy.
Beloved character actor David Strathairn is the three-point king of The Bourne Ultimatum. He spends ninety per cent of the movie in dark CIA rooms barking orders at computer screens, and yet he simply cannot stop eating. It is bucket after bucket with this man. You are watching a master at work.
You’d better believe he’s the one who says “Jesus Christ, that’s Jason Bourne” in this movie.
Aside from being the three-point king, Strathairn also serves as the embodiment of the malignant American surveillance state in this movie.
This is the bit that probably passed me by in 2007.
Covering these original movies out of order is going to make for a tricky throughline about the whole post-9/11 thing, but let’s do our best.
Actually, Ultimatum isn’t a bad place to start. While the Bourne franchise naturally falls into the bracket of mainstream pop cultural response to 9/11 and the War on Terror, it didn’t start that way - Identity, as we’ll get into next week, began production in 2000, making its evocations of the paranoid state of affairs at the time of its actual release in 2002 a complete accident.
No such grey areas with Ultimatum, which is completely the product of the mid-2000s, by which time the jingoistic rush of the early decade had curdled into something more complicated.
What’s enjoyable about Ultimatum’s brand of timeliness is that it isn’t strenuous. (We will eventually arrive at a Bourne movie that takes the opposite tack.) It’s not about terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction, or regime change, or any of the really en vogue topics of the day. It all feels more subconscious than that. Some of the thorniest stuff here might not really have been intended, but it leaks through anyway.
The Bourne movies are obsessed with surveillance. That’s where Jason Bourne is spotted. They are intensely interested in the work of electronic tracking, of scanning phone records and CCTV cameras and emails to hunt someone’s trail. The CIA is depicted as the Peeping Tom behind it all, peering through the world’s screens to find their target, privacy be damned. They’re Morgan Freeman in The Dark Knight, but with the power of the US
What feels very 2007 about Ultimatum, though, is how shitty and ineffective all that surveillance can be. The CIA can only see through static cameras, have to work for minutes to tap phone calls. It all takes effort, and it all leaves gaps that people like Jason Bourne can slip into. I was reminded of old stealth video games where the enemies have little cones of awareness you can slip around with the right timing. Like those games, it’s a system that can be circumvented.
You can’t see everything, goes the worry. Pass all the laws you like, introduce all the security screenings in the world, but Jason Bourne is still able to cut about Europe like he’s on his first interrailing trip. He can actually make it into your offices and call you from there by playing a very simple trick. It doesn’t give you a great deal of faith in the mechanism, if faith in the mechanism was something you’re searching for.
This is so very 2007. You can’t help but notice that everyone has a flip phone, that David Strathairn asks to scan someone’s BlackBerry. The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t out-of-date, but it is dated. It wouldn’t go down like that in the era of smartphones and Apple Watches and 5G everywhere. Those dark spots that Jason Bourne is able to slip in and out of with practiced ease? They would be a lot smaller these days. Straithairn would be able to find Bourne by his AirPods.
Another quintessential mid-2000s vibe here is the baffling - but fun baffling - attitude towards authority. Ultimatum invokes the general mistrust mixed with overriding, despite-it-all optimism that would lead to the election of Obama the following year perfectly. On one level, it’s a down-the-line scathing critique of American overreach, of gluttonous intelligence agencies who have lost sight of protecting the American people, of nasty Strathairns using the fraught moment to gather power and acolytes to their cause. Bourne’s story finally clarifies itself as the story of a good soldier corrupted and manipulated by the powers that be for their own ends. It’s not ambiguous.
What I’m about to tell you next may shock you.
Despite its obvious criticism of CIA overreach, this major Hollywood production struggles to critique the power structures themselves. I know, this never, ever happens.
Bless its little centrist heart, but The Bourne Ultimatum maintains an impressively doe-eyed faith in the capacity of good people to work within the system. Strathairn is a bad guy, but specifically he’s a bad egg - the wrong kind of intelligence bigwig. Joan Allen on the other hand? She’s okay. She can be trusted to set things right. Corruption in American intelligence in this world is a bug, not a feature. A big bug, but still a bug. Watching Strathairn getting perp walked on TV at the end, you’re inclined to think that everything is okay now, and those nasty people taking advantage of our national surveillance infrastructure are gone. Maybe the good people can set it right.
I mean, no. Obviously no. This is silly. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Given all the reason in the world, at this point, to doubt the establishment forces that had given us pointless wars and racist legislation and glossy, empty PR stunts, the culture wasn’t ready to give up on them. The wrong people had the levers of power, but they could be held to account, removed, replaced. Improved upon and cleaned up.
Perhaps we’re getting to why the Bourne franchise didn’t make it past the Obama era. Time will tell on that front.
I promised you all Moby. I keep my promises.
There are four main versions of Moby’s “Extreme Ways” used in the franchise. The first two - as we’ll get to - used the original version. Ultimatum was the first that Moby re-recorded and remixed.
This was the first version of “Extreme Ways” I heard - I was not aware for some time, sadly, that this wasn’t the original. I think it makes sense that it was this one that had such an impression on me.
This is, spoiler alert for the rest of these remixes, the best version. The best version for the ending credits of a Bourne movie, anyhow. In any version of “Extreme Ways”, it’s the first 40-odd seconds - or the whole instrumental intro - that varies each time, and Ultimatum’s makes a banger impression. That little drum fill-in, the enigmatic vibes of the notes following that first horn sample? Mwah. Perfectly cooked.
I think it also helps that this is the only entry with a definitive final shot as opposed to a lingering pan up to the horizon like the other four. The needle drop isn’t a pleasant means of gradually whisking us out of the movie, as it’s usually deployed, but an exclamation point on a trilogy. Those opening horn notes are perfectly timed to the realisation that Bourne made it out of the final confrontation, making it a little fanfare about our hero’s survival.
Beautiful cinema. Julia Stiles’ smile and all.
You bet your bottom dollar that this ending swept my eight year old self away. Like, movies can do that?
Hell, yes, they can do that. Movies are when Jason fucking Bourne is in them.
Next time: Rewind, rewind! We’re jumping back to 2002 for The Bourne Identity, where the world was introduced to a confused man on a boat. It’s a story of a tortured production, early 2000s style and the beloved art of old movie trailers. See you then.