Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Three-peat

Yes, I admit it, I was that guy this weekend, the guy who walks around in public with a fever and a cough. In my defense though, I was only out looking for Motrin and a thermometer (successfully and repeatedly unsuccessfully, respectively), and I spent the rest of the three and a half day weekend on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

However, as you may be surprised to discover, my diseased excursions were not the highlight of my weekend. What was, you ask? Well, as soon as I failed to roll out of bed on Saturday, I decided that Sunday would be the perfect day for my long-awaited Bourne triple-header: by then I would likely be well enough to stay awake for the whole thing, and yet still sick enough to justify not doing anything else.

My worry going into this undertaking was that watching all three of the Bourne movies together would reveal them to be a mishmash of varying creative styles and disjointed plots, but in fact the opposite turned out to be true. For three movies filmed separately at three year intervals (with two different directors, even), they make a surprisingly coherent and consistent whole, a true trilogy. Each leads smoothly into the next, and each adds further color and depth to the story without feeling contrived (even in the case of the end credits, where the extra dimensions are literal). The common musical themes help to tie the movies together as well — again, even in the end credits, where the same song is used for all three movies.

The third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, did an especially good job of finishing off the trilogy. It tied in well to The Bourne Supremacy, touching on two of its major plot points and reframing one of them in a different context that was a genuine (and much enjoyed) surprise to me when I first saw it in the theaters. It also bookended Supremacy well, having several scenes that were the reflection (and the opposite) of earlier scenes in The Bourne Identity. It says a lot that the action highlight of Ultimatum is a masterfully paced and imaginatively staged eighteen minute long search-chase-boom-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-pause-chase-fight sequence.

So am I an action movie fan? Only when they're done like this...

[The more detail-oriented among you are now thinking, "That only accounts for about 6 hours of the weekend, what did you do on that couch the rest of the time?" Well, I also watched Lost, Season Two. Turns out Michael was always a psycho, I just couldn't see it at the time.]

Labels: ,

1 Comments:

Blogger John Buerger said...

Hey, good call on the Bourne Trilogy. I felt the same way about those movies. It's hard to come away from an action movie these days and say, "yeah, well done and even artistic at times." But I felt like I could do that with these movies. Thanks for your review.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 9:36:00 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home