The Bourne Legacy

By definition everything that’s modern is more advanced than what preceded it. Thus the latest movie adaptation of the Robert Ludlum thriller series, The Bourne Legacy, is a more advanced form of the spy thrillers that had their heyday on screen with James Bond (though it does feature some stars of yesteryear like Albert Finney and Stacey Keach). One might argue that John le Carre who preceded Robert Ludlum is more advanced since the line between the interior world that his characters inhabit and the exterior world they operate in not disambiguated. But on a superficial level a movie like The Bourne Legacy takes the spy as super hero to its logical extreme, albeit against a panorama of the kind of exotic locale that Ian Fleming liked to employ. While James Bond could ski and fly and punch it out with Oddjob or Rosa Klebb, the notorious SMERSH Colonel with a poisoned spike in her shoe, the latest offering partakes of bioengineering and lethal drones which are operated like the controls on a video game console. Programmable behavior and neural design with viruses delivering genomic messages create a whole new breed of agent who sometimes, like rogue athletes an overdoses of steroids, have psychotic episodes. Ed Norton who plays one of the higher ups controlling  these agents says “our mission is indefensible, but absolutely necessary” and part of that mission sometimes means destroying the objects of an intelligence agency's own creation. Thus we have a plot where heroic fighters for the free world are eliminated by the genial characters they once reported to. The self-attack that characterizes the modern version of espionage is a little like autoimmune disease with the body’s defenses attacking its otherwise vital organs. Reading about the antics of our own intelligences services and their repeated ability to undo each other’s work, one can’t help feeling that this is a case where even far flung escapist fare has an almost journalistic edge.