Bourne Ultimatium

author	subject: Bourne Ultimatium
mike cervello (original message) View My Profile	Posted: 8/5/2007 1:57:16 AM I may be alone in saying this, but it's not all the critics are cranking it up to be. With the digressions from the whole story of THE BOURNE IDENTITY, BOURNE ULTIMATIUM never goes into the great face-off of Jason Bourne and the great assassin, Carlos, as shown on the TV miniseries THE BOURNE IDENTITY starring Richard Chamberland and Jacklyn Smith. Jason Bourne is supposed to be a rouge assassin for the CIA who was killed off by the CIA and David Webb takes over his identity and learns all of Carlos' signature styles of killing to fish out an international assassin who the CIA has long been after. That's really why Bourne is so kick butt and hard to kill, because Carlos is and David Webb was train in all of Carlos' ways and skills, but took on the Bourne identity to become a copycat to get Carlos to come after Bourne where the CIA could take him down. In the end, David Webb as Jason Bourne outsmarts Carlos by beating Carlos at his own game. That's a pretty good spy story just like what you see in the big screen Bourne movies, but with a different flavor. I do like the BOURNE ULTIMATIUM, but will remain somewhat dissappointed. The Bourne Ultimatium has some great action scenes and good suspense. So, people who only know the movies and saw the first two will like this one as well.
dharmaone View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 7:21:24 AM I just wish they could budget for a tripod. I was ill about five minutes into it. Action was cut super fast, almost a blur. Fun movie. But my head!

3lusive View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 12:18:04 PM i thought it was weird in the outdoor scenes no polarizing filters or filtering of any kind.... color seemed odd. sky/bright lights were washed out..... the hand held scenes were too amateurish like blair witch. seemed like a rough draft and i loved hte first two bourne movies.
RocketCar View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 1:07:41 PM Interview with Damon "...the script was being written on the fly (when there even was a script) while the crew was hopscotching across three continents. ''There was an aimlessness to the process,'' says Damon. ''It was miserable.'' Then, there's the fact that all of this aimless misery lasted for nearly a year, an eternity in moviemaking time nowadays. And the fact that they didn't wrap until weeks before Ultimatum was due to open." [Damon] "There were days when we would find ourselves in the middle of a scene and realize ''This isn't in the movie!'' The great thing is, when Bourne scenes don't work, they really don't work. I did so many awful scenes that never made it into the film ... it was harder work than I've ever done because it was so unrewarding. There's a buzz you get when it's working, and we didn't really have that ... There were days of fun on Bourne, but a lot of it was gallows humor ... In any given scene I didn't know where I'd just come from or where I was going. Which, as an actor, you kind of need! And Paul's only direction was ''Butch-er and more intense!'' Finally I was like, ''If you give me the f---ing 'butch-er and more intense' note one more time, I'm gonna kick your ass!'' It's incredible that we've been able to pull the rabbit out of the hat three times." Sounds like a recipe for success.
mike cervello View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 1:20:42 PM From an action point of view, the action was shot with too many close-ups. I agree about filters being needed to make it look better. It's too much on the fly shooting with a serious lack of planning the shots and they somehow really lucked out.
Trillion View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 2:40:30 PM I am left again to wonder how a disorganized no shooting script flick, got funded. I mean, don't producers want to see the script before they buy in? Course this one had the creds of the previous two bourne movies and same director. And a rap on the head for Damon for dissing the director and the shooting process in the press.
nomadboi View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 4:25:21 PM I hated the jerky-cam effect on the second movie, and am sad to hear they did it again on the third. There was some really good fight choreography that you just couldn't follow due to bad camerawork and editing. Okay, so maybe they're trying to convey the emotional story of chaos instead of the physical dialogue of a fight scene... but Bourne's a cool-headed character, and for him, the emotional chaos isn't what it's about anyway. People keep over-using this 'technique', and I've yet to hear of anyone who really likes it. Are editors getting paid by the cut, like old serial writers getting paid by the word? What's up with that? For what it's worth, that jerkiness was much less noticable and more tolerable on DVD, on the small screen at home. I imagine on something like Imax it'd suck. Hard. Imagine three-story bounds with each camera jerk...
mike cervello View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 5:28:10 PM I'm thinking this could also be a problem of the director not wanting to follow a written script and that could be a big problem. When critics praise the director on how great the action was shot, and in reality it's not all that great, it pets his ego not to follow a written script. He just makes it up as he goes along. That was one of the many problems with QUEEN OF THE DAMNED. If you look at all the deleted scenes, as well as the movie, it's very obvious the director was making up a story as he went along. There's so many versions of each scene, the director must have driven the cast crazy and the editor must have been cursing out the director during post, trying to make some sense of all the footage to the written screenplay. That's really bad filmmaking. You've got to go into production with a clear vision of the story. Some of the best shot footage in BOURNE ULTIMATIUM was the underwater scenes which was probably shot by a second unit director and a second unit DP.
Johnny Wu View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 6:07:32 PM Last I remembered reading the 2nd Bourne movie, the jerkyness was intentional to make people 'feel' like they were RIGHT there. When the director heard that people was throwing up after watching the film, he said "good" In fact, I think that article was posted here somewhere a year ago...
lemur View My Profile	Posted: 8/6/2007 7:02:14 PM I really enjoyed the movie. This was the one sequel of the summer that I went to see opening weekend. The fight scenes and action scenes were incredible. I was surprised to hear Damon complain about the director and the filming. Seems a bit unprofessional. But hey I guess if I worked my butt off for a year I'd want to vent some frustration. I didn't see that dysfunction in the final movie. So it's a credit to Damon for keeping it together. I've always thought he was a very good actor. He's good at the action scenes and he also has some depth. If any of you guys want to see a great performance, check out "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Damon is creepy and pathetic as the same time. Definitely oscar-worthy in my opinion.
finsterlaw View My Profile	Posted: 8/8/2007 11:10:06 AM I thought it was hard to watch because there was too much action and not enough content. The third film in a series never really is a hit anyway, people just watch it because they need to finish the story. Overall it didn't do it for me, but had to see it :)
slider_alt View My Profile	Posted: 8/8/2007 1:25:27 PM Well I guess I'm glad that I didn't blow the small amount of bucks, that I do have in my pockets, on it Saturday then. It's pretty much a tradition for me to see the 'Bourne' movies at the theater--but if it's another "third movie let-down" then I can wait till later on.
The Cincinnati Kid View My Profile	Posted: 8/8/2007 2:03:05 PM i really liked it. yeah, the shaky cam was a bit much sometimes, but for the most part i just felt like i was there in the middle of it all, which i guess is the whole aim of the documentary style approach. i saw Damon on The Daily Show the other day, and it sounds like he and Greengrass are good friends, and that he wasn't necessarily complaining about the shoot, just talking about how difficult the experience was. if you go on to read the whole article and not just the highlighted snippets, there's actually some really good stuff in there, too. i can see where it's not for everyone, and i would have liked to have seen some wider shots in the fight sequences, so i could tell what was going on. on the whole, i thought it did exactly what i expected a Bourne movie to do.
RocketCar View My Profile	Posted: 8/8/2007 2:40:19 PM One reviewer's take... "In The Bourne Ultimatum, the camera, mostly handheld, follows the characters through train stations, airports, and the bowels of sinister office buildings (the prospect of a CIA headquarters hidden in Manhattan is a lot scarier than the one in Langley), and through the ancient zigzag stone alleys of Madrid and Tangier. At times, it zooms down from the sky, homing in on vehicles like a heat-seeking missile. Yet rarely, if ever, is there a cozy master shot. Each image is torn, aggressively, out of the one before it — the movie doesn't seem to be creating the action but catching it on the fly — and the result is that hardly a moment goes by that we don't experience in the moment." "Greengrass, too, stages hand-to-hand combat with a thwacky viciousness that feels less choreographed than anything he did in The Bourne Supremacy. It may be that this director is liberated to create action with such whirling physical freedom because the story, by now, verges on the abstract."