The Bourne Supremacy

Hey, everyone, Time Stalin here. Just got back from 'The Bourne Supremacy', a movie that gave me a lot to think about. Specifically, just how much brainwashing is enough. See, if you program someone to have no conscience, and suddenly he gets amnesia, then you have a rogue with all your super-soldier skills, but no prevailing desire to follow your orders. This, of course, is why you should probably engineer some sort of chemical dependency for them, preferably something rare, but I guess if you're on a budget you can try to control them with promises of cigarettes.

So, 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Because we were all looking forward to tying up all the loose ends from 'The Bourne Identity', right? Because we all remember 'The Bourne Identity', right? I'm kidding; sure, no one was burning their crops over it, but the original was a nice little spy movie with a lot of good ideas, and the sequel is in the same vein. For those that missed the original, Matt Damon plays a mentally programmed assassin (good) who loses his memory but keeps his skills (bad) and takes on his own government to try and discover his past (very bad) and ultimately succeeds (Hollywood). It's an American cinematic tradition: the individuals always defeat the conglomerates. It just doesn't make sense. The original ends with Bourne telling his keepers never to bother him again, and the sequel begins a few years down the road, with him being bothered and trying to figure out why.

The movie is nicely paced, pretty well written with a few surprising twists and a lot of advice on how to deal with assassins. Also, how you should train your assassins. I wish I could have gotten a better look at all of Bourne's clever spy skills, but all the action scenes were filmed with an overly stylish shaky camera that prevents you from having any idea what's going on. In one scene, Bourne uses a rolled up magazine as a weapon against a man with a knife. Ideally, I would be able to loop this scene over and over in the commissary of my training centers, to give my soldiers an idea of the sort of ingenuity I'm looking for, but as it stands the scene would make everyone nauseated. A brilliant plan butchered by poor direction, believe me, I know all to well how it is.

The verdict: three and a half out of five. Could've been four, four and a half if the direction had been less flashy and more... Proletariat.