The Bourne Ultimatum

(aka The Bourne Nauseatum)

Imagine for a moment that you're watching the scene in "The Godfather" where Al Pacino sits down to dinner with Bruno Tattaglia and Capt. McClusky and your view of the conversation is in constant motion. The camera angle on each character is moving horizontally and vertically by small amounts and is in constant motion enough that you have a hard time focusing on the actors and the conversation itself. You're trying to watch the movie and the characters you're deeply entranched with and you can't stop thinking about the moving camera. What's going on here?

Now imagine you're watching Lt. Dunbar sitting down to talk with Kicking Bird and Wind in his Hair in "Dances with Wolves" and the camera bounces up and down on their faces as if the cameraman couldn't hold his/her bladder until the take was over. Regardless of the fact that you have very talented actors portraying interesting characters in entrancing stories, you can't stop focusing on the constant motion of the camera. It happens so much that you have to fight the ridiculous impulse to reach up and grab the screen in a sad attempt to get the camera to just sit still for a moment.

It's hard to imagine those scenes from both "The Godfather" and "Dances with Wolves" filmed any other way than how we saw them sitting in theater seats. Yet that is exactly the cinematography formula that was used in "The Bourne Supremacy" three years ago and repeated ad-infinitum in this year's "The Bourne Ultimatum". The style of filming the director Paul Greengrass uses has been hailed as leading the director to "Spielbergian levels" and flamed as being filmed by "attention deficit monkeys". I agree with the latter.

My wife and I actually went and saw "The Bourne Ultimatum" twice. The first time, the filming style was so nauseating that it distracted both of us from the guts of the movie. A few days later we watched the first two Bourne movies again and while watching the second one, it hit me! I realized that the third movie overlapped the second movie. Duh! I'm not normally this slow, so I'll blame it on the filming style. When we saw the Bourne Ultimatum a second time, we went knowing the filming would irritate us so we mentally set that aside and we really enjoyed the storyline and the acting.

There is a feeling of "ok, been there, done that", but if you liked the first two films, you'll like this third one. Bourne finds out more about how his training all started and seriously begins to face his demons. And man, he has a lot of them. One of our most favorite character traits about Jason Bourne is his methodical and systematic nature. He spends no time thinking about what to do in any given situation. He just does it and his timing is usually impeccable. In The Bourne Ultimatum, there's even more of this MO and it's really cool to watch in action. Here's a very small teaser for example. During a chase scene in Morocco, Jason is running through crowded city streets with vendors and people lining the streets and cops chasing him. Without breaking stride, he picks up a spray can from a vendor display and a few yards away he drops it into an open fire burning in a 55 gallon barrel. In the same casual move that tossed the can in the fire, he grabs an innocent man standing next to the barrel and pushes him backwards out of the way as the barrel explodes behind them. Jason lets the guy go and continues on his way down the street without as much as a glance at what's behind him. He already knows what's behind him, and what those chasing him will do in reaction to whatever he does next. Matt Damon pulls off this casual nonchalant mannerism of expertly. The character is a joy to watch.

The main criticism I can find with the movie is Paul Greengrass moves the camera so much and so often, especially during the fight sequences, that you don't get to see Bourne in action enough. A few days after seeing "Ultimatum" the first time, I read an interview with Matt Damon in Entertainment Weekly and all my questions were answered. This movie began filming and completed almost half of the principle filming schedule without a completed script! No wonder the filming style felt so hacked together. The best way to cover up the fact that the set designers didn't know what was being filmed the day after tomorrow is to keep moving the camera around so nobody can see imperfections in the scene. The best way to cover up fight choreography that was decided on-the-fly by stunt coordinators who didn't have a script telling them which way was up is to move the camera around so much the viewer can't tell. The best way to distract viewers from the fact that your actors didn't know where they're coming from or where they're going, is to move the camera around so much the viewer can't focus on any one thing long enough to second guess it all.

Very enjoyable movie. Jason Bourne is at his best. If it were not for the filming style, I would consider this a very good movie.


Copyright (C) 2007 Devon Hubbard