The Bourne Satellites
We haven’t yet seen The Bourne Ultimatum, but at least some of us here at Really Rocket Science are counting the hours until we can sit in the darkness with our bucket of buttered popcorn and soda for the final installment of the series, loosely based on the Robert Ludlum novels.
This is work-related, we tell ourselves, because of the extensive use of satcom in the film to drive the plot, which centers around rogue baddies in the intelligence community tapping into video surveillance networks (think of our Slingbox webcam on steroids) to track the film’s hero:
The plot goes something like this: London journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) has stumbled onto a hyper-secret CIA black op code named Blackbriar.
It’s so sensitive the whisper of it on Ross’ cellphone sends sinister surveillance technology abuzz an ocean away in midtown Manhattan.
There, the Blackbriar leak may as well be a blot of blood in shark-infested waters, sparking the attention and ire of a Bush-league spook (David Strathairn) and Pam Landry (Joan Allen), the honourable but tough-as-nails CIA bureaucrat from 2004’s Supremacy who, in the last moments of that film, told Bourne his birth name.
Thing is, that still hasn’t happened yet — Ultimatum actually kicks off in Moscow following Bourne’s confession to a young Russian girl whose parents he murdered. Still racked by flashbacks to his vicious past — more replete with post-9/11 imagery than ever before — Bourne’s search for his identity leads him to Ross and, consequently, to Strathairn’s thinly-veiled Republican stooge.
From here, Greengrass piggybacks jaw-dropping set piece upon jaw-dropping set piece. When the ever-resourceful Bourne sets up a meet with Ross at London’s Waterloo Station, he puppeteers the reporter through corridors and crowds to evade a rapidly-constricting network of operatives and video surveillance cameras linked via satellite to Strathairn’s hi-tech hub.
Here’s the trailer:
And here’s the breathless review (one of many) from the Winnipeg Sun:
Go ahead and ascribe an adjective — breathtaking, heart-stopping, head-spinning — the fact is no stream-of-consciousness thesaurusizing (pulse-pounding, nerve-rattling, spellbinding) does justice to the experience of this fastest, fiercest Bourne yet….
The best action movie of the summer? Try of a generation.
Director Paul Greengrass hasn’t manufactured a sequel — he’s written code for a template all future Bonds, Ryans and whoever-the-hell-else will have to match or stumble and die trying.
Given that the film brought in more than $70 million in its opening weekend, we suspect we’re not the only fans anxious to get into the theater this week. What of you? Have you seen the film? What did you think of the director’s use of satcom technology as an integral part of the film?
