My son Nigel Gussman and I just finished watching all five of the Jason Bourne movies, in a week. In the first movie, the Bourne Identity, Matt Damon was 31. By the fifth film he was 46. And now Nigel and I watched the first hour of "Ford vs. Ferrari" in which Damon is 49.
Since I had never seen Matt Damon in a movie before I saw Ford vs. Ferrari last November, it was interesting to see him age in the Bourne role and then be firmly in middle age as Carroll Shelby.
The Bourne movies are a Cold War relic even though they are set in the 21sr Century. They trace a nearly perfect assassin through the awakening of his conscience, plus he uncovers the deepest of Deep State conspiracies!!
My friend Cliff is also watching the movies. He will watch the last one this weekend. We were Cold War soldiers so the conspiracy culture is home ground for us. Cliff was most disturbed by movie four, "The Bourne Legacy." Matt Damon is not in that movie. Bourne is a tough Army Captain recruited to his role as an assassin. In the Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, a recruit who could not meet the minimum aptitude requirement and is give pills to make him smarter while he also takes pills to make him a physical marvel.
We both disliked the Frankenstein aspect, the idea that people could be engineered not only to superhuman strength but to superhuman intelligence. And if you miss the pills, you become weak and dumb. And the whole idea that the Army takes men who can't meet the minimum standard, sneaks them in and turns them into supermen is a sad view of the military.
On a lighter side, if you like car chases, the Bourne movies destroy dozens of cars from around the world. The Moscow chase scene smashed a truly international array of autos. And in Vegas, a murderer in a stolen SWAT vehicle plows though traffic like a snowplow, upending dozens of cars in a minute on the Las Vegas strip.
