by HIRAM LEE
Matt Damon (left) and Julia Stiles in Jason Bourne
Directed by Paul Greengrass; written by Greengrass and Christopher Rouse
It has been 14 years since Matt Damon first portrayed the Jason Bourne character created in the Robert Ludlum novels. The former CIA assassin and victim of memory loss has spent several films trying to uncover the truth about his past, growing increasingly disturbed by what he learns.
At the end of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Bourne appeared to have found the answers he was looking for. He exposed to the world the criminal operations of the CIA. Wounded and floating in New York City’s East River, he swam off to an uncertain future. (The Damon character did not appear in The Bourne Legacy, 2012, ostensibly the fourth film in the series, despite its title.)
In the latest installment, simply entitled Jason Bourne, the former assassin now ekes out a living by fighting in bare-knuckle boxing matches in Greece. This is where Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) finds him. A former CIA agent herself, in hiding since her last adventures with Bourne, she has just hacked into an agency database and stolen several classified files, including some containing still more secrets about Bourne’s past. “It could be worse than [whistleblower Edward] Snowden,” says one agency analyst of the data breach.
Agent Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who oversees the CIA’s cyber espionage work, is alerted to the hack. She teams with CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) to track down Bourne and Nicky and prevent the information from becoming public. Lee wants to bring Bourne back in from the cold. Dewey wants him dead and sends an assassin known only as “the asset” (Vincent Cassel) to take him out.
At the same time, Dewey is in the process of convincing “social media giant” Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) to grant him access to the user data from his popular websites. Privacy versus security, described as “the major question of our day,” is the theme around which the entire movie is constructed.
For reasons which are ultimately more personal than political, Bourne reluctantly goes to war with the CIA yet again.
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The name of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is mentioned at various times throughout Jason Bourne. Damon, for his part, came out publicly in Snowden’s defense in a 2013 interview with the BBC, saying, “I think it’s a great thing that he did.” Around the same time, Damon told Black Entertainment Television that Obama “broke up with him” and that he questioned “the legality of the drone strikes and these NSA revelations.”
By 2015, Damon and Obama had patched things up. Now Damon described the individual at the head of the government responsible for those drone strikes and NSA programs as “a remarkable human being” who was “shockingly easy to be around.”
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