Jason Bourne

The American government is so free and open that its filmmakers can continually expose its crookedness and authoritarianism. It was true in Tricky Dickie’s reign and it remains true in these troubled days of the Snowden and Assange exposures of government spying and betrayal. 

Of course, all that will change when Donald Trump is elected pres. Trumplethinskin (not my coinage, alas) has pledged to suppress the critical press and judiciary along with his more specifically racist niceties. 

Matt Damon’s newest incarnation of the alienated and amnesiac former intelligence agent exercises the public’s fear of government surveillance and an uncontrolled tyranny. The arch villain is the CIA director Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones, profoundly and implacably wrinkled). We don’t know what happened to brothers Huey and Louie in our loss of Disney innocence. 

Innumerable lives are wasted and — perhaps worse — public and private automobiles demolished in the government’s ardor to protect itself by slashing away the individual’s rights, especially to privacy.  

In the spirit of the times — including our Hillary’s nomination — Bourne is abetted by two empowered women who play out the opposite themes of loyalty and betrayal. They also embody the hero’s alternative impulses — to return to the system or to remain a freer wheeling outsider. 

The film’s title sticks to the hero’s (assumed) name. The “Jason” is the heroic quester of the (non-Toronto) Argonauts and the (non-Trump) Fleece. And as Bourne means ‘journey’ the character unsure of his identity, history and purpose is on an endless quest to save himself, a journey without other purpose or clear destination. The trip is the thing. Expect sequels more. 

The word famously throbs in Hamlet:

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourne

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,…

     No danger of the latter in this non-stop action flick. The cast of thought quite pales amid the smashing action and spectacular computer screens.