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.
