The Bourne Ultimatum

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

As last installment in the Bourne trilogy—The Bourne Ultimatum—makes clear that going back to the past that went wrong and retrieving it properly will certainly make things right for anyone. Any past that had been wrong all along is where anyone should start in order to go some place definite and clear. This is after all the case of Jason Bourne, whose identity is either identified and/or altered by the CIA who has in fact given birth to him.

According to the film, the search for the self is still the most difficult to undertake. When Jason Bourne is faced with the dilemma to know his real name, his identity, the movie reminds us of Logan’s return to his creator who made a wolf out of him in X-Men. After suffering the death of his girlfriend in India, he feels there is no way he could hide from his pursuers. He has to go back to who he is so he could proceed further.

As regards acting, there is something in Matt Damon that makes us say he must have taken this role seriously. While he made it clear in one published interview that he had to study the role seriously because it demands him so, he displays it just thus in the manner that he is the character, and no one else. In fact, the composed yet human Bourne temperament has stood all through the film—he just convinces the audience enough.

Forgive nothing. After he has pinpointed the identities who made miserable out of his life and sensibility, Jason Bourne just has to show us that they can never deter him from prevailing in the end. After all, he has been left with no choice but to “hunt down his past in order to find a future.”

While Pamela Landy’s (Joan Allen) character figures as the mother figure for the child in Jason who is simply bullied by his elder brothers, David Straithairn’s grim aura that stalks on the hero spells evil the most articulately.

Meanwhile, the CIA operations set to eliminate Bourne may be hackneyed on varied grounds. But the Blackbriar thingy makes clear that the corrupt human nature cannot just cease to exist, which is why Ludlum must have written the trilogy.

Sadly though, the film has greatly departed from the Ludlum masterpiece—splicing critical plot lines into oblivion. Yet, with Damon’s significant delivery of character and the dizzying action sequences reminiscent of and even surpassing the previous two projects (“Bourne Identity” in 2002 by Doug Liman and “Bourne Supremacy” in 2004 by Paul Greengrass), this powerhouse project comes out hardly unscathed.

David Fincher's 'Zodiac'

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Horror

David Fincher’s “Zodiac” opens in a grim sequence, one that makes a book-turned-into-film venture worthy of a second look.

In a night of revelry, two unsuspecting youngsters who are making out on a holiday or simply relishing the Independence Day Celebration in California drop dead and injured in their car after an unidentified man shoots them point-blank.

The opening murder scene highlighted by the swelling of Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" makes the film unforgettable. A grim reality depicted in the senseless murder slides along with this 60s rock anthem which makes you cringe a bit. And a bit more.

The killing of Darlene Ferrin and her companion in 1969 virtually starts the ball rolling—the killer goes on his butchery until the time comes when the lives of a number of San Francisco journalists and cops get entangled with the search for his identity. Through his ciphers and letters, the serial killer terrifies the San Francisco Bay Area and taunts the police. As investigators in four jurisdictions begin to search for him, the case becomes an obsession for four men—as their lives and careers are built and destroyed by the endless trail of clues.

While San Francisco Chronicle may be entitled to berate the film for whatever reason it has, aside from being the site of struggle of the story’s characters, saying it “falls flat. and giving it a C rating, what makes Fincher’s adaptation sensible is its treatment of a crime thriller woven in the threadbare characters—Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), the San Francisco Chronicle lead reporter whose life gets preoccupied and later emaciated by the Zodiac lure; Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the cop who pursues and later becomes the pursued, and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist who eventually cracks it further for good. Graysmith’s nonfiction work is itself the source material for the film.

After years of search and investigations, however, the Bay Area police could not properly identify the Zodiac murderer who had senselessly killed a number of promising persons in the state. They could not prove him guilty on the bases of handwriting and fingerprints, two indicators that could pin down criminals for their dastardly acts some three decades ago.

While it is not so difficult to pinpoint the criminal—what with the DNA tests and similar other forms of crime identification and detection—these days, what strikes us hard in the film is its depiction of how a potential criminal who had been at large for years and should have been imprisoned for his heinous acts can simply go on at large just because police technology was simply quite old-school or backward, as compared today.

Nevertheless, the experience presented in the film spells the realities we witness in our own country nowadays. Here and now, politicians and criminals alike loom at large, living with the rest of the saner civilization which they prey on, or on which they feed.

“Zodiac” in this sense becomes a predictable masterpiece as we easily see what it speaks to us of the stark realities that make our lives difficult. Some people are born to make us live in fear. Some are just born to make things difficult for us unless we try to do something about it.

John Caroll Lynch’s Arthur Leigh Allen, who comes hardly unscathed during the film’s timeline—he is identified by the 1969 killing witness Mike Mageau only in 1991 or towards the end of the film—visibly mirrors the criminals in our country who are still at large because we lack measures to properly track them down. This is simply engrossing as it is gross.

Screened locally some four months later than its original release worldwide, Fincher’s adaptation of Robert Graysmith’s whodunit throws open the puzzle that is not solved because in reality it was not solved for a long time.

Others say it is a kind of “procedural thriller for the information age,” trying to mirror the stark realities of the 1970s.