Security goes to the movies:
"The Bourne Ultimatum," starring Matt Damon, opened to an estimated
$70.2 million in the U.S. and Canada -- a record for a movie launched in August,
and one of the best starts ever for an action film.
Angela Gunn and Ken Gagne found at computerworld.com
August 06, 2007
August 06, 2007 (Computerworld) Time once again for "Security
Goes to the Movies," a continuing look at Hollywood's fascination with
technology and the inevitable bleeding from the eyes security folk experience
when Hollywood "takes liberties" with tech, the laws of physics, and
other aspects of reality as we know it. Or is that hemorrhaging inevitable? Can
a movie include tech that isn't stupid? Our subject today is The Bourne
Ultimatum. Our movie reviewer is associate editor Ken Gagne, writing in
black; our privacy / surveillance nerd is security channel editor Angela Gunn,
commentings
in red
Matt Damon returns as the
trained assassin Jason Bourne for the latest showdown in The
Bourne Ultimatum
Some things you wish you could forget. (Like Firewall The Bourne Ultimatum , based loosely
on the late Robert Ludlum's trilogy of novels.
Jason Bourne is an unwilling lethal weapon -- a man with no past seeking the
people who made him the killing machine he is. (If you've seen X-Men 2 ,
you can skip this film. WHAT? Maybe if you're dead,
but even then you should at least throw it onto your Netflix queue -- if
that search-for-identity plotline was resolvable by watching just one movie,
Hollywood as we know it would not exist. And in case I don't make this clear
later on: I. Loved. This. Movie. Not just in the sour nice-timing-with-the-FISA-wiretap-reapproval Casino Royale -- a direct descendant of the Bourne trilogy's
emphasis on reasonably plausible tech and real action rather than wacky made-up
gadgetry and numbing CGI -- you're going to dig this movie.
Bourne begins his quest by interrogating a British journalist to whom a
former government agent has spilled the beans on Blackbriar -- the
new-generation version of Treadstone, the black-ops project that created and
employed Bourne. But when a story that big breaks, you can bet Bourne isn't the
only one who wants to know the reporter's source. Unfortunately for Bourne, the
next head on Blackbriar's chopping block is his. Can he discover his secret
identity before it's too late?
Behind The Scenes - The Bourne Ultimatum
This Summer Jason Bourne Comes Home... Remember everything. Forgive
nothing... Behind the Scenes of Bourne Ultimatum Film clip
What my colleague doesn't mention here is the chewy
tech goodness in play from the drop -- again, working in the realm of the real
for maximum geek enjoyment. The Echelon program's international wiretap and
phrase extraction capabilities are a major plot point (and, yes, they call it
Echelon -- I thought of Duncan
Campbell be a Campbell nod).
The list continues. London's ubiquitous surveillance
cameras are spotlighted exceedingly well; a prepaid mobile phone grants a
limited but crucial privacy smokescreen; a dual-authentication biometric key
makes a showy appearance; a Norton antimalware program slows down a character's
laptop.
A few moments are a little offputting -- Hollywood will
weird out with the on-screen graphics, I fear -- but one of the cardinal
beauties of the Bourne trilogy is that the tech is pretty plausible, even if the
realm of "plausible" has greatly expanded in the era of Google Earth
and such. In fact, I made a few notes re: Everything I Needed to Know About
Enterprise Security I Learned From Jason Bourne (or EINTKAESILFJB) -- more on
that in a bit. For now, though, I will note that not only is Jason Bourne a
genius of lateral thinking and probably more up-to-date on current surveillance
technology than half the people in your office, but the Waterloo station scene
-- in which he directs another character's movement via mobile phone, correcting
for missteps on the fly -- makes him my candidate for Best GPS Device Ever.
Someone please have Matt Damon installed in my car immediately. Thank you. Let
us continue.
If you're wondering why that question hasn't already been answered by the
revelation of his name, date of birth and hometown at the end of The Bourne
Supremacy , it's all a matter of timing. Whereas two years passed between the
first two films, it's now been only six weeks since we saw Bourne escape from
Russia. Yes and no. The timeline does a gratifyingly
twisty thing about two-thirds of the way through. I'd just rewatched Supremacy
the night before and totally understood where we were and why, but your mileage
may vary depending on how well you remember the previous film's epilogue.
Where exactly these events fall in the franchise timeline, though, we're not
made privy to until the film is nearly done -- a deception I found confusing,
since it falls in the midst of an action sequence. I was still putting the
pieces together as bodies were falling. Dude. Netflix.
It's the price you pay for not having the previous two films regurgitated in
this one, a process that might have slowed down the butt-kicking. And we
couldn't have any slowdown on the butt-kicking. And even the facts he gathered
at the end of the last movie aren't what they seemed...
Don't worry about those bad guys staying down, though: The Bourne
Ultimatum 's body count is down 75% from the previous film. And despite some
wild car chases, there are no truly stand-out fisticuffs. Huh?
I didn't breathe for the duration of the Tangiers sequence. Sure,
we like to see Bourne exemplify his supremacy with some utter smackdowns, but he
doesn't defeat his more capable foes with anything too original or creative. Dude,
I'm serious -- are you sure you weren't watching the Harry Potter movie next
door? And there's a EINTKAESILFJB teaching moment right there: Good security is
less about mass gadgetry and more about brains and smart deployment.
In the first film, Bourne proved the pen is mightier than the sword; in the
second, a rolled-up magazine was the weapon du jour . It's a gimmick I've
come to expect of Jason Bourne (and Jackie Chan), and I was disappointed to find
no such equivalent scene in this installment. !!! A BOOK!
HE KILLS A GUY WITH A FLIPPIN' BOOK! And not some rolled-up O'Reilly text,
either -- though I can't imagine anything that would've pleased the nerds in the
audience more. Brother Jason rolls with HARDCOVER! OLD SCHOOL! The progression
itself was a nice little nod to the film's trilogy status -- pen, magazine, book .
I don't even know how you follow that up. Maybe in the fourth film of the
trilogy -- if Douglas Adams can do it, why not -- I say he lobotomizes a guy
with a BlackBerry? BlackBerry right through the frontal lobe. I am so there .
EINTKAESILFJB moment: The Web is nice, but don't be shy about keeping a few good
hefty reference books near to hand.
Of course, Bourne faces more than hired goons, and films such as this can't
get away with much when it comes to IT. Live
Free or Die Hard or,
putting it another way, because that audience tends to be less about the thought
and more about the spectacle. IT was just the means to that end. Or,
rather, HollywoodIT. So very different -- one is reality-based, and the other...
is from Hollywood.
In Bourne, IT is as much the obstacle as the people who employ it, but we're
not graced with much that demands Bourne's brilliance. In one scene, he pulls a MacGyver
(or is it a Home Alone? ) with a fan and a flashlight, which is decidedly
low-tech. Which is the point and the glory -- and where
real security folk can play along at home. Bourne's victories are victories of
lateral thinking and fast, creative problem-solving, not just beatdowns and
superhuman endurance. EINTKAESILFJB moment: Security folk not only need
creativity to address problems, they need to be aware of user creativity in
skirting the rules. Also: The mayhem never stops. (Sorry.)
The rest of the film's tech is primarily of the surveillance genre: wiretaps,
GPS tracking, even gunmen with camera phones, giving some scenes the feeling of
a first-person shooter video game. Or, you know, Friday
afternoon's headlines . There's nothing along the lines of the more
entertaining cell-phone-SIM-duplication we were treated to previously; instead,
we watch Bourne do a Web search. I want that zooming
monocular thing that he trains on CIA headquarters. There was a lot of nice tech
around the edges, but even I didn't want to see this become a gadgetfest. With
the exception of the point where I started shifting around mumbling about
uploading to YouTube/BitTorrent -- more on that in a second -- I was comfortable
with the tech shown. The most daring infiltration of the film -- that of
CIA headquarters itself -- we're not even witness to, leaving much to the
imagination.
Perhaps that's for the best, as if the film had gone on any longer, I
would've had to reach for the airsickness bag. As with The Bourne Supremacy ,
this film is directed by Paul Greengrass, author of Spycatcher that's
the M15
tell-all and director of United
93 another film about effective use of low-end
technology -- think about it . He employs in this film the same shaky
camera style that I found so nauseating in his other works. A cameraman's job
should be to frame a shot and focus the audience on a particular object or
action. Greengrass' style is to make his crew look as bewildered as the audience
feels, constantly panning and refocusing as they try to find the action in a
scene. A couple can't even sit down for coffee without constantly bobbing and
weaving! Rather than drinking in the cinematography or choreography, your eyes
will be working hard just to discern what's going on. We're
out of the security realm here, but purely as an audience member I'm going to
disagree -- the camerawork was kinetic and exciting, and based on the amount of
popcorn I put away during the movie, not at all nausea-inducing. I particularly
liked the disorientation effect during Julia Stiles' chase segments, where the
effect reminded me that the same stuff that Matt Damon made look easy or at
least nonfatal for 2.5 films at that point really... isn't.
It's a shame, since the talented cast deserves to be seen. David Strathairn,
who earned himself some serious security-geek
cred Sneakers [yes, we love us some
Whistler] , plays the single-minded deputy CIA director with a simmering
malevolence. Likewise, I'll never cease to be amazed by Julia Stiles. Granted,
she doesn't actually do much in this film, other than look very serious and
pouty. But she's a breath of fresh air as the youngest person on the set, while
still not being the silly git she seemed destined to become after films like 10
Things I Hate About You . EINTKAESILFJB moment: Listen
to your users, as Stiles' Nicky Parsons and Joan Allen's Pamela Landy do, and
you just might learn not only what they did but what they were trying to do --
useful data for predicting what they might do subsequently.
Allen returns as agent Landy, who emerged at the end of
Supremacy as the moral center of Bourne's world post-Marie (who, though
only seen in flashbacks, gets a nice visual reference late in the film -- Matt
Damon's reaction to the moment reminds us again that he really is that good
at keeping this character understated but absolutely on emotional track, and
with precious little dialogue with which to work). Allen has the most low-tech
moment of the film, the one that had me wishing someone had heard of
peer-to-peer for classified document dissemination -- hey, why not? the rest of
the government's doing
it
By this point in his fictional and cinematic life, Jason Bourne has earned
himself a reputation, and it's fun to see him live up to it. When he's first
spotted on a security camera, it's gratifying that the villain is justified in
exclaiming, with no small amount of dread: "Jesus Christ, that's Jason
Bourne." But the acts Bourne took to earn that renown were more satisfying
than this experience. Greengrass' camera direction is a major detriment to the
film, obscuring some otherwise enjoyable sequences masterminded as if by two
chess players; but ultimately, what the camera belies just doesn't live up to
the Bourne legacy.
Couldn't disagree more. I haven't seen a trilogy end on
a note this true and satisfying since The Lord of the Rings -- not a
scene wasted, not a plot point unmet. The final 10 to 15 minutes, in which
Bourne gets the answers he's been seeking, turn the entire project into a
powerful statement about what we consent to, volunteer for and accept in the
name of security, loyalty, courage or patriotism. I certainly haven't seen a
more satisfying moment at the movies this summer -- go to The Bourne
Ultimatum for the action and geekery, stay for the ethical agonies.
Recommended without reservation -- and that's how this review ends. After all,
Ken, if there's ANYTHING you should know from the movie, it's that the geek with
the hands on the gears always gets the last word.
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