The Bourne Series (film)/Headscratchers

• This could possibly be the most microscopic IJBM in the history of EVER, but Marie used Bourne's toothbrush! Eeeww.
  • Maybe it was a new one from the cabinet?
  • Using each other's toothbrush isn't generally a big deal for people who are swapping spit anyway.

• My biggest problem with the first film was that I can't understand how a government would train someone and even use some advanced medical techniques to make him some kind of super human, but then would plant a capsule in his body that beams all the information you need to trace him back to several aliases. This would only be useful to the agent if he had amnesia and had someone kindly remove the capsule from his body. Otherwise, it only serves as a way for anyone who captures him (or finds his body) to use all this information against him.
  • Maybe Bourne had it done on his own initiative, as insurance against getting burned.
  • It's a holdover from the first Ludlum novel, where Ludlum had to deal with the fact that a guy going on an assassination mission is not going to carry any form of ID, and the plot requires amnesiac Bourne to have at least one thing telling him where the next plot coupon is. In the book it was a microfilm capsule.

• Three for the price of one, all from Supremacy:
  • Marie's death in the opening. Bad enough that they offed a relatively likeable character, but the fact that it serves as nothing more than the instigating moment is kind of insulting. There's no emotional confrontation with her killer (hell not really a confrontation period), nothing but Bourne reverting back to his icy-cold Badass persona. It's like they decided, "hey, there's nothing else we can really do with her, let's kill her."
    • Haven't read the novels, so I cannot speak on her role in them. However, for the film, she serves as an immediate and powerful motivation for Jason Bourne's character for the rest of the movie. There is no emotional involvement because it is made specifically to be that her death was accidental (shooter thought it was Bourne), thus adding a new layer of internal conflict with Bourne. No other action could have prompted Jason Bourne to take the same actions, especially while she was still alive.
  • Also, did anyone else find Ward Abbott's characterisation inconsistent? At first he comes off like a cowardly old man out to cover up his involvement. Then he suddenly turns into a monster, capable of murdering a member of his own team. And then at the end he...commits suicide? If he's a coward he should have surrendered. If he's a monster he should have shot Landy and destroyed the tape. As is...what the heck?
    • I don't think he ever comes off as cowardly at all, he was just trying to cover his tracks to prevent investigation, an act of self-preservation. His entire motivation in the film, from his first seconds on screen, is to cover up the Treadstone project and his own involvement in the corruption case, and we see at every turn that he is practically willing to do anything to cover it. When that fails, he is left with no other choice but to end it, as his reputation is gone (Bourne took the tape with him and left the gun) and shooting Landy would just bring up even more questions
    • He did have Conklin executed in the first movie just to help cover up the Bourne mess.
  • And lastly, during the fight with the Berlin Treadstone agent, the guy says he and Bourne are the last agents left. What happened to the guy in Madrid? And why, when Bourne spent the entirety of the last film in Germany did no one think to send the Berlin agent after him? I mean Conklin was evil, but I didn't know he was that stupid. Not to mention, why'd he attack Bourne? Bourne wasn't there to kill him. Bourne sort of explained that, but doesn't even bother to explain it again and maybe, prevent bloodshed. I mean if he was willing to not kill Abbott, why not give this guy another chance?
    • Well, the other agent had been tracking Bourne since Paris, so regardless of the fact that he wandered into Germany, where more agents were stationed, it's no good reason for the other agent to call off the mission when he was so close to Bourne, and you certainly don't want two agents operating simultaneously, otherwise you stand a greater risk for exposing Treadstone or leading to more of the members getting killed in the confusion. I would imagine that he attacked Bourne in the house simply out of mistrust. It's already been made substantially clear that all the Treadstone agents suffer from serious psychological issues, so I can't imagine they would be the most trusting people in the world. Plus, the agent is still loyal to his agency in some manner (since he calls in that Bourne is there), so I doubt he has any desire to expose his agency's information.
  • If anyone can explain any of these to me in a way that makes them make more sense I'd be very grateful. Is it just because I haven't seen the third movie yet?
  • Look, he had a gang of mooks a few minutes away ready to come to his aid if there was an alarm. It's obvious that he'd been warned that Bourne was back in business and had set himself up as bait. He was simply following orders to kill or capture a Rogue Agent.
• YMMV, but the whole "posing as an assassin to bait a real one" plotline from the book was rather more interesting than the one we got, and it bugs me that they couldn't have just used a fictional assassin to replace Carlos or set the film in the 80s. Either way could have kept the later films from diverging too far from the books.
  • A plot that complicated would have gotten in the way of the action.
• Let me get this straight, the entire plot of the third movie is that the Blackbriar people think Jason is gunning for them, even though he has no motivation to do so, spared the life of the person whom killed his wife, AND has made absolutely no moves WHATSOEVER against their organization since the second movie. Where they really that desperate for a way to get the third movie off the ground, or am I missing something?
  • Kramer and Vosen wanted Bourne dead because he's proof that illegal black-ops programs existed, and they didn't want anything about Treadstone/Blackbriar being revealed to the public.
• The entire sequence in the third film about the reporter. CIA able to know within seconds/minutes of when someone in the middle of Europe says a specific word (which COULD have been someone saying "a black fryer")? CIA able to suddenly have the whole call recorded? And the caller's ID? And everything about him? And then they have over a dozen perfectly equipped spies ready to deploy within a very short period of time? And they're able to just hack into London's security network in seconds and view the video feeds? And they're able to hear what he's saying even through the middle of rush hour traffic, lots of noise, and the guy is speaking inside a car? Wow.
  • This is actually not that far off. It probably wouldn't happen in real time but the US and its allies do have several systems which sift through all telecommunications that pass through assets they control. Email, phone, cellphone, even this post. They sift through it with a massive pattern recognition system and when certain trigger words appear they flag the message, save it, and send it down to some analyst spooks. At one time the NSA employed 10,000 such analysts. The other wiki has some data. The fiction in Bourne is the speed here not the breadth of surveillance.... now I've flagged myself for detention. I hope you're happy.
  • Another possibility: Bourne reads in the paper an earlier article that Ross had written about him, identifying him as a CIA operative. It's possible that Ross had already been put on some sort of watch list at that point, so they were already monitoring him when he mentioned Blackbriar.
• Gunning down a journalist from the Guardian in broad daylight in the middle of London is a sure way to get a bunch of investigative journalists looking into whatever it was that Simon Ross was working on when he was killed. Not to mention that British officialdom would be rather pissed off too.
  • Ross being an investigative journalist, it is possible that he'd done stories on various unsavory characters, any one of whom could have wanted him dead, not necessarily drawing immediate attention to his current story.
  • Vosen doesn't seem particularly proud of it either when he's with Pam : "Decisions made in real time are never perfect."
• From the book series (Betrayal in particular): When Dujja brainfucked Bourne into taking Fadi out of his cell, why did they play it to make Bourne look suspicious to CI? It served little to no purpose, and it was completely counterproductive to their goals; eventually it actually caused the Old Man to send Lerner to terminate Bourne. What was Karim thinking!?
  • Eric van Lustbader sucks.
• Why in God's name could Ludlum estate choose EVL that mediocre fantasy writer to continue Bourne series? Read the Bourne Deception and see how ridiculous the plot becomes. Indonesian high priest? Shaman? Really?
  • Havent read the book but why not an Imam? Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world im pretty sure you could have a very well respected Imam fill that role.

• What is the full extent of Bourne's fighting skills and combat prowess?
  • Highly-trained hand-to-hand combatant based mostly on Eskrima, supplanted by formidable observation skills, social engineering skills, and ability to improvise. He's kind of like Batman, if he were real. Nonetheless, he is just as vulnerable to bullets as anyone else, and there are several other operatives who are at a comparable level in at least physical combat.