The Bourne Bust

The newly released Jason Bourne has taught me one thing: your favourite team does not win the match all the time. After watching the first three original adaptations a dozen times each, the number has reduced to a half with The Bourne Legacy. In the latest avatar I almost dozed off at the cinema. The latest film is like a repetition of Ultimatum, but without any additional story. In ‘Part 4’, Treadstone was over, only to be reintroduced in here. Besides, the anti-hero, Jason Bourne, still remains an experimentally failed man but who still possesses the métier to bring down all the bad guys.

The only new ‘twist’ is Bourne realising, after partly discovering himself, that his father was also CIA operative who was killed in the line of duty. A modern touch has been also added on the line of Wikileaks but it hardly adds to the substance of the movie. To cut it short, Jason Bourne will be good if you watch it after forgetting entirely about the three originals. The latest version is directed by Paul Greengrass, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christopher Rouse. Finally, with underdeveloped characters and a messy storyline, Jason Bourne only reminds of another film Hangover (2009) that was so good in the first part but its sequels were watchable only when you are too lazy to do anything. The uninspiring conclusion only makes the film a just-watch-it-once kind.

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Trivia of the day: There are 13 Bourne novels in total, out of which three were written by Robert Ludlum and the others by Eric Van Lustbader, who ‘writes under a brand name’. It is too hard to digest the concept of ‘writing under a brand name’ but then we lived in a globalised consumerist society.

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My first Robert Ludlum’s novel was The Janson Directive (2002). Those were the days of Mario Puzos, PG Wodehouses and Frederick Forsyths. But nowadays fiction has been off my shelves except once in a while and I prefer non-fiction to other genres. Some of the few fiction paperbacks that I have bought to enhance my tsundoku-moments would stare at me, almost screaming in silence but in this age of extreme distraction I can easily ignore them. My neglect of fiction must be the reason I didn’t know about other Bourne novels, apart from the three ‘originals’ and The Bourne Legacy.

In childhood days, we were used to a term ‘part’ that denotes the sequel of a film: such as Rambo Part Two, Terminator Part One and Naapi Marakki Huithi Part Three. Now we have franchises.

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Out of his 27 novels, Ludlum had three Bourne novels:

1.    The Bourne Identity    (1980)
2.    The Bourne Supremacy (1986)
3.    The Bourne Ultimatum (1990)

The remaining were written under the Ludlum™ brand by Eric Van Lustbader. 

4.    The Bourne Legacy (2004)
5.    The Bourne Betrayal (2007)
6.    The Bourne Sanction (2008)
7.    The Bourne Deception (2009)
8.    The Bourne Objective (2010)
9.    The Bourne Dominion (2011)
10.  The Bourne Imperative (2012)
11.  The Bourne Retribution (2013)
12.  The Bourne Ascendancy (2014)
13.  The Bourne Enigma (2016)