Tenet

Christopher Nolan is an ambitious filmmaker that with every movie he makes sets out to challenge himself, whether its an unconventional narrative with Memento (2000) or making a non-franchise movie like Inception (2010) at a time when studios rarely greenlight projects not already based on an established property. He is a rare Hollywood studio filmmaker capable of making original big-budgeted movies that make hundreds of millions of dollars. This has given him the clout to make his boldest movie yet – Tenet (2020), a sprawling spy thriller that explores the manipulation of time.

This movie is a testament to the kind of juice Nolan has within the industry. He is able to command a budget over $200 million starring John David Washington, whose casting as the movie’s lead must have raised eyebrows with studio executives as he has no experience with a project of this magnitude or the kind of drawing power of someone like Leonardo DiCaprio or Matthew McConnaughy – actors who helped sell Nolan’s previous ambitious fare. Even the casting of Robert Pattinson as Washington’s co-star was something of a risk as he is no longer the bankable Twilight heartthrob he once was having rejected Hollywood for the most part to appear in foreign and independent films.

Nolan is also employing a deliberately demanding narrative at a time when Hollywood wants to spoon-feed audiences that have been conditioned over decades to expect formulaic product. This may explain why his name factors so prominently in the movie’s marketing as with the absence of a big name movie star he has become the star. Is this something the ambitious filmmaker wanted all along – to be a distinctive brand name like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg? Or, has he bitten off more than he can chew and will Tenet finally end his streak of profitable popcorn movies with more on their minds than car chases and explosions?

The movie begins with an impressively orchestrated sting operation at the National Opera House in Kiev with an unnamed CIA operative known only as the Protagonist (Washington) liberating an exposed spy and obtaining a mysterious device. He’s caught and tortured by Russian agents but manages to take a cyanide pill before divulging any information and dies. Or does he? He wakes up in a hospital bed from a medically-induce coma. Officially declared dead, thus taking him off everyone’s radar, he’s given an assignment by his boss (Martin Donovan): prevent World War III from happening. This is tagged with a bit of advice: “All I have for you is a gesture with a combination with a word: tenet. Use it carefully. It’ll open the right doors but some of the wrong ones, too.” This last line is particularly relevant to understanding what happens later on in the movie.

With the help of a fellow operative named Neil (Pattinson), the Protagonist discovers that the man responsible for triggering World War III is a powerful Russian oligarch by the name of Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). To get close to him, he befriends his unhappy wife (Elizabeth Debicki) by appealing to her interest in fine art. The rest of the movie plays out the Protagonist’s mission to get to Sator and discover how he’s going to bring about the end of the world and stop it from happening.

Some have complained that Tenet is too complicated and the plot too hard to follow. Is it maybe that we’ve had our senses dulled by an endless stream of mostly mindless big budget blockbusters that do little to challenge us? Nolan provides plenty of exposition rest stops along the way to explain what’s going on, such as the scientist (Clemence Poesy) the protagonist meets early on that gives us a taste of movie’s central conceit: a technology known as “inversion” that sees objects and people traveling backwards in time by reversing their entropy. Or, as she puts it at a gun range where the bullet travels back into the gun instead of hitting its target, “You’re not shooting the bullet, you’re catching it.” He gradually fleshes this concept out over the course of the movie until the last third where, admittedly, things do get a little tough to follow but not enough to ruin the enjoyment of the exciting climax.

Tenet features some of Nolan’s best choreographed action set pieces, from the opening sting in Kiev to the stealing and crashing of a jumbo jet liner into a building that is as impressive as anything in Inception. The opera house sting, in particular, is right out of the Michael Mann playbook in the way it is staged and the use of dense tech lingo as Nolan drops us right into the middle of the action with little to no explanation, reminiscent of the opening sequence in Miami Vice (2006).

John David Washington is excellent as the no-nonsense protagonist who tells someone early on, “I’m not the man they send into negotiate. Or the man they send in to make deals, but I am the man people talk to.” The actor deftly juggles action sequences with dialogue-heavy ones effortlessly. He plays a rather enigmatic fellow with little to no backstory thus forcing us to get know him through his actions in the movie.

He plays well off of Robert Pattinson’s quirky operative. It’s the juicier role and the actor has fun providing much-needed levity at just the right moments in this otherwise po-faced movie, much as Tom Hardy did in Inception. For example, when he and the Protagonist are talking about stealing and crashing a jumbo jet liner, the latter asks, “How big of a plane?” to which the former says sheepishly, “That part is a little dramatic.” The way Pattinson delivers this line is a wonderful bit of subtle comic timing.

Kenneth Branagh plays a vicious Russian billionaire with malevolent intensity. Nolan wisely prolongs his introduction for as long as he can so that the character’s reputation precedes him and our anticipation of his first appearance increases. Sator is a power hungry bully with a crucial edge – he communes with the future for a very specific reason that isn’t the usual mad man villain stuff we’ve come to expect from these kinds of movies.

Ludwig Göransson replaces Nolan’s long-time go-to composer Hans Zimmer and the movie is better for it. With a few exceptions, he eschews Zimmer’s sledgehammer orchestrations for pulsating electronics that provide the movie’s moody backbone and enhance Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which adopts a grounded, realistic look reminiscent of Inception.

It’s no secret that one of Nolan’s burning ambitions is to make a Bond movie. He doesn’t need to anymore. With Inception and now Tenet he’s made two spy movies jacked-up on science fiction steroids and done it his way with the kind of creative freedom the Bond producers would never allow. With this movie it feels like he has pushed the techno spy thriller as far as it can go by introducing grand science fiction concepts that turn the genre on its head.

What is Nolan’s ultimate end game? He has reached the point in his career where he has the creative freedom to control every aspect of his movies and so everything in it – the muffled dialogue, the overpowering music and sound effects – is intentional. Nolan wants to be regarded as a serious filmmaker such as Stanley Kubrick or Terrence Malick – two of his cinematic idols – are considered serious auteurs. He lacks that special something that those filmmakers have, transcending genre trappings to create films that are groundbreaking and unique in ways other than on a technical level.

Nolan is at his best when making cerebral spy thrillers like Inception or gritty comic book movies like The Dark Knight trilogy. He doesn’t do touchy-feely sentiment very well, which is why the emotions expressed in Interstellar (2014) felt forced. He’s not a warm filmmaker like Spielberg but more of a puppet-master like Kubrick. Nolan’s movies work best when he uses emotion like a garnish, sprinkling it sparsely over his story. Tenet is a strong, bold effort that invites repeated viewings, not to get past its aggressive sound mix, but to unravel the timelines of the three main characters who are complicated through the plot machinations of the movie.

Thunderball

While two generations separated us, one thing my Grandfather and I bonded over was our love of movies, namely Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy and Sean Connery James Bond movies. With the latter, he was old enough to have seen them when they first came out – their brand of ruthless violence and beautiful women appealed to him. He came from a time when men were men and women in spy movies were kittens in distress. I think he also admired Connery’s style and particular brand of machismo. Of course at my young age, I had no idea about any of this; all I knew was that he (a man of few words) and I (equally so) could enjoy those movies together, which is why the Connery Bond movies will always have a special place in my heart, Thunderball (1965) being my favorite. Conventional wisdom says that Goldfinger (1964) is the best movie of the Connery era but I love the ambition of Thunderball. It has the best action sequence and Bond girl from this period.

The movie’s opening prologue sets the tone right away as Bond confronts a widow that turns out to be a male enemy agent. They engage in battle that is quite intense – Bond finally kills him by breaking his neck with a fireplace poker. He proceeds to escape the scene with the aid of a jetpack! This segues into one of the most striking opening credits sequences, complete with beautiful women swimming underwater alongside men armed with spear guns, foreshadowing the movie’s exciting climax, all the while Tom Jones belting out the theme song with his trademark gusto. Maurice Bender uses color masterfully in this sequence, mixing a saturated palate of dark purples and blues with red, giving them a distinctive look.

SPECTRE are at it again. After eliminating a duplicitous agent, the organization gets down to business as their Number Two a.k.a. Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) has devised a plan to steal a NATO bomber carrying two nuclear warheads, then ransom them for $280 million. The British government has seven days to come up with the money or SPECTRE will bomb either a British city or an American one. I like that we only see the head of SPECTRE from the shoulders down. Remember when mastermind villains had an air of mystery to them? I’m always amused by the casual indifference Largo shows after one of his contemporaries is fried by the boss. Business as usual.

By sheer coincidence, Bond stumbles across this plot while recuperating, which mainly involves bedding the lovely female staff member (Molly Peters) there, at a spa in England, where he’s nearly killed for his troubles. This sequence features awkwardly blatant sexism as Bond initially forces himself on said staff member…then blackmails her into having sex, in lieu of not telling her superiors about a mishap that almost resulted in his demise. Bond’s attitude towards women is certainly the most problematic element of both the movie and the franchise. It is the aspect that has dated the movie the most.

Thunderball features one of the most exotic and gorgeous Bond girls – Dominique “Domino” Derval (Claudine Auger) – whose brother (Paul Stassino) was killed by SPECTRE and replaced by an imposter. Her “guardian” is none other than Largo, which gives Bond access to him. She doesn’t immediately give in to the spy’s charms, or fall into bed with him, either. She plays hard to get or, rather, she is the property of another man. That doesn’t last long once Bond enters the mix. Early on, he recognizes that Domino is different, telling her at one point that she swims like a man to which she cheekily replies, “So do you.” Claudine Auger plays Domino as someone candid and self-aware enough to admit that she’s a kept woman but one gets the sense that she’s biding her time. Domino uses Bond to help her escape from Largo – and then later as an instrument for revenge. It is an interesting relationship, to say the least. Auger conveys a wonderful vulnerability in the role, shedding tears when Bond informs her of her brother’s death. She isn’t an aloof socialite. She becomes determined to kill Largo and make him pay for what he did to her brother.

With his eye patch, Largo is one of the more distinctive Bond villains. He oozes confidence and power but is not afraid to get his hands dirty, exemplified early on when he kills an operative who has outlived their usefulness. He’s also not above feeding another to a swimming pool of sharks. He owns a yacht with the coolest name – Disco Volante, which would go on to become the name of Mr. Bungle’s second album (they’ve also covered “Thunderball” in concert). Largo’s finest moment is when he invites Bond to his estate. They trade thinly-veiled insults in a rather sophisticated dick-measuring contest, Largo casually threatening Bond with a shotgun while they shoot some skeet. Largo takes the first shot, nails it and says to Bond, “What could be easier?” Bond smiles and says, “Seems terribly difficult” before effortlessly nailing his shot: “No, it isn’t, is it?”

Bond, however, meets his match with Largo’s female enforcer Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi). She has no qualms about torturing his female assistant (Martine Beswick) then bedding him, proving to be just as aggressive as he is in the sack. She’s fully aware of Bond’s reputation and even calls him on it: “James Bond, who only has to make love to a woman and she starts hearing heavenly choirs sing. She repents, then immediately returns to the side of right and virtue,” which pretty much nails Bond’s relationship with women. She’s the most dangerous person in the movie, perhaps even more than Largo, and comes the closest to trapping and killing Bond in the movie, with one of her men managing to wound him.

The movie climaxes with a thrilling underwater battle of Largo and his men versus Bond and his, with dangerous sharks thrown into the mix. One of the frequent complaints leveled at Thunderball is that there are too many underwater sequences. While, the crashing landing and subsequent salvaging of the NATO bomber does drag on for too long, you’ve got the underwater meet-cute between Bond and Domino, Bond photographing Largo’s yacht, and Bond having sex with Domino in the ocean. Then there is the aforementioned underwater battle. Its critics say the sequence drags on too long but I love every minute of it. I like that Largo isn’t afraid to lead his men into battle. He’s not a criminal mastermind that lets others do the killing. He leads by example. This leads to a kinetic fist fight with Bond aboard the Disco Volante as Largo tries to escape, only for Domino to save the spy’s life and get her much deserved revenge as she delivers the killing blow – a rarity in the franchise. She is the first Bond girl to directly save Bond and the first one to kill the main baddie.

Thunderball ends in typical cheeky Bond fashion as he rides off into the sunset with the girl living to fight another day, in another installment. This marks the fourth and last of the truly essential Connery Bond movies that has it all: cool gadgetry (the yacht that can detach its rear half to make a speedy getaway), sharks, a nasty villain sporting an eyepatch, beautiful women (three of them!), and just the right mix of well-timed levity, and visceral action.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

With a Mission: Impossible movie you know exactly what you're going to get: plot twists a-go-go, some baddie hell-bent on world domination (or destruction) and Tom Cruise performing a series of insanely dangerous stunts as his Ethan Hunt character and the IMF team save the world. You would think that being disavowed by their government yet again would get old but we expect it as part of the franchise's tried-and-true formula. Let's face it these movies are cinematic delivery systems for masterfully orchestrated action sequences with Cruise upping the ante with every subsequent installment. The latest – Fallout (2018) is no different. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie returns to orchestrate the mayhem once again and improves on his previous outing, the excellent Rogue Nation (2015).

In the wake of Hunt capturing Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) in the previous movie, his fanatical disciples from the Syndicate have regrouped and renamed themselves The Apostles and are hellbent on obtaining three plutonium cores for their latest client, the mysterious John Lark. Hunt and his team are tasked with finding Lark and intercepting his meeting with the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), an arms dealer who is brokering the deal. Naturally, things don’t go as planned and Hunt is forced to free Lane with the help of untrustworthy CIA operative August Walker (Henry Cavill), charged with babysitting the IMF team, but who clearly has his own agenda. The rest of movie plays out in a series of plot twists and double-crosses as the stakes are increasingly raised.

Freed from the shackles of the dour DC Cinematic Universe movies, Henry Cavill gets to play a hulking brute cum antagonist – “the hammer” to Ethan’s “scalpel” as Angela Bassett’s Director of the CIA puts it so succinctly. The actor is clearly having a blast playing an assassin as evident in a fantastically kinetic fight sequence that takes place in a public bathroom as Walker and Ethan square off against a mysterious terrorist. It is a sober reminder of just how stale the speed-up/slow-down action sequences of the superhero movies Cavill has been involved in have become. Here, McQuarrie allows him to cut loose and play a different role, which he dives into with gusto.

McQuarrie manages to give everyone on the team their moment to shine, putting an emphasis on teamwork – something that was missing from some of the previous installments. In particular, it is great to see Ving Rhames given so much to do where in the past it felt like he was marginalized at times. Simon Pegg even gets in on the action, including a crucial part in the movie’s nerve-shredding three-way finale.

If Paula Patton’s tough IMF agent in Ghost Protocol (2011) marked a significant evolution in how female characters went from damsels in distress to throwing down just as hard as the men, then Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust – introduced in Rogue Nation – was even more advanced. Her character is clearly Ethan’s equal and with her own intriguingly enigmatic agenda. This continues in Fallout as initially we aren’t sure just whose side this MI6 agent is on and then once it becomes clear, her dilemma is just as personal as Ethan’s.

Tom Cruise always comes across as an otherworldly presence in interviews with his forced laugh and vague, stock answers that come from playing the fame game for so long, but in the Mission: Impossible movies, in particular this one, he appears completely comfortable as he’s played Ethan for so long that it has become second nature. This familiarity with the character and his relationships with the IMF team has never felt more natural. As a result, we care about what happens to them, which is crucial to Ethan’s central dilemma in Fallout: saving someone he loves versus saving the world. McQuarrie lets us think that we know more about Ethan’s past by the end of the movie without actually telling us anything that new – instead, shedding light on his inner life, which is summed up best towards the end when a battered Ethan is reunited with his team. The emotions that play over Cruise’s face are surprisingly moving.

With Ghost Protocol, Cruise upped his game on the stunt work with every subsequent installment having us wonder, what crazy stunt is he really going to do next? It is a wonderfully analog element in this digital age chock full of CGI heroics that we pretend happened but know in our hearts were created in a computer somewhere. McQuarrie is his partner in crime, using long takes and full body shots to show Cruise really jumping out of a plane at 25,000 feet and flying down the streets of Paris on a motorcycle at insane speeds only to get knocked off and thrown like a rag doll. How long can he keep this up? Who knows but for now it is a lot of fun to watch.

Is this the best Mission: Impossible movie yet as some claim? I don’t know. I have to see it a few more times and let it sink in before I can rank it up against the rest of the series but it is certainly right up there. McQuarrie has pulled off a deft cinematic trick with Fallout by making a standalone sequel. There is just enough exposition dialogue to clue newbies into who everyone is and their relationship to one another while judiciously sprinkling references to previous movies for fans in the know. He also sets up fascinating possibilities for the next Mission: Impossible movie should he choose to accept it.

Jason Bourne

After the critical and commercial success of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), its star, Matt Damon, and its director, Paul Greengrass, declined to make a follow-up, feeling that they had taken the character of a psychogenic amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne as far as he could go. To be fair, the film felt like a fitting conclusion but Hollywood studios are not known to stop cranking out installments for lucrative franchises and Universal Pictures gave the series’ screenwriter Tony Gilroy a shot at writing and directing his own entry in the series. The Bourne Legacy (2012) saw Jeremy Renner take over the lead as another CIA operative on the run from the United States government when his black ops program is shutdown. The film performed well enough but the general feeling was that most people wanted to see Damon reprise his role as Bourne.

Enough time had finally passed for Damon and Greengrass and they came up with a new Jason Bourne story, inspired partly by the effects of Edward Snowden’s leaking of classified information from the National Security Agency on espionage and surveillance all over the world. How would it affect the Bourne world and bring him out of self-imposed exile? Not surprisingly, the unimaginatively titled Jason Bourne (2016) was a financial success as audiences were more than happy to see the actor reprise one of his most beloved characters while leaving many critics underwhelmed.

Still haunted by all the people he killed for the CIA, Bourne (Damon) is living off the grid in Greece as a bare-knuckle brawler. Meanwhile, ex-CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) is in Iceland hacking classified agency databases for more information on Bourne before he had his brains scrambled by Operation Treadstone. This gets the attention of CIA Cyber Ops chief Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) and knowledge of the breach is quickly reported to the current director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones).

The rather ambitious Lee pushes to be put in charge of the operation to find and bring in Nicky and, if possible, Bourne while Dewey hedges his bets and brings in the Asset (Vincent Cassel), an Operation Blackbriar assassin, to take out Bourne. The rest of the film plays out in tried and true Bourne fashion with him on the run from the CIA, which takes him to various places all over the world, trying to piece together more of his past until the inevitable confrontation with a rival assassin.

Bourne and Nicky’s initial meet and greet is amidst turbulent demonstrations and civil unrest on the streets of Athens. Greengrass does an excellent job orchestrating and immersing us in this chaos as we see Bourne use it to his advantage. The director ratchets up the tension as CIA operatives close in on Bourne and Nicky, demonstrating why he’s still one of the best action directors around.

The Bourne films have always had memorable fight scenes and this one is no different as Bourne and the Asset have a bloody, knock down, drag-out fight that is a more stripped down encounter then in previous films. Jason Bourne also has a memorable chase sequence as Bourne pursues the Asset, driving an armored SWAT truck, through the streets of Las Vegas in an exciting, intense sequence.

For most of the film, Matt Damon plays the Bourne we are familiar with from the previous installments but this is bookended by the introductory scene, which gives us a self-destructive man with no direction, and a climactic scene towards the end where he confronts Dewey and you can see Bourne trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to do next. The most frustrating aspect of Jason Bourne is that Damon and Greengrass don’t delve into Bourne’s questioning side enough as they fall back on the requisite action set pieces of mayhem that is the staple of the franchise.

Tommy Lee Jones brings his trademark, no-nonsense gruffness as he plays yet another government bureaucrat frustrated by Bourne’s actions. Alicia Vikander plays a thankless role that requires very little emotion on her part, as her icy operative remains enigmatic and morally elusive. The always-reliable Vincent Cassel plays the first of Bourne’s rival assassins to have significant screen-time and something of a backstory that gives the character a personal stake in his mission to stop Bourne.

After The Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon were done with the franchise with the former saying, “I discovered in my heart I didn’t have another one in me,” and the latter quoted as saying, “For me, I kind of feel the story that we set out to tell has now been told.” Over the years, the latter, motivated by fans of the films, felt it was time to revisit the character. After the commercial and critical success of Captain Phillips (2013), Greengrass was in no hurry to revisit the franchise.

In 2013, Universal Pictures executives met with Damon in the hopes that the actor would be open to another Bourne film. He was, but what clinched it was while making Elysium (2013) in Vancouver, he accidentally came across the production offices for The Bourne Legacy: “I thought I was completely at peace with the three movies…but when I saw their production offices, it hurt me in a way that surprised me.”

Damon met with Greengrass in Los Angeles and told him how much people wanted to see another Bourne film. This got the director thinking about ideas for a new one along with his longtime creative partner (and editor on several of his films) Christopher Rouse who said, “At heart, Bourne is a patriot who’s been betrayed by the institutions he believed in. Those are very identifiable feelings for people today.”

Greengrass wanted to make the new film relevant to what was going on in the world – like the others in the series – and began writing the screenplay at the end of 2014 with Rouse and input from Damon, incorporating narrative threads from Ultimatum with aspects of online privacy, including a Julian Assange-type character and a Facebook-type company set in a post-Edward Snowden world. Unlike the previous Bourne films, Greengrass had worked on they had a completed script before principal photography began.

The tricky thing about sequels is that if you deviate too far from what made the previous film(s) successful you risk alienating fans who want more of what they loved. If you stick too close to the formula you’re criticized for playing it safe. Either way, filmmakers are screwed but the best sequels build on what came before in a meaningful and satisfying way. Jason Bourne is somewhat successful in doing so.

What separates Jason Bourne from the other films in the series and makes it relevant for what is happening in the world today? For starters, cyber warfare features prominently with Heather Lee representing a new kind of foot soldier – the hacker that knows how to manipulate data in new ways that makes it tougher for people like Bourne to evade detection and achieve his goals. Social media is featured prominently as Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), the CEO and founder of Deep Dream, a Google+-type website, is in bed with the CIA, which raises all sorts of questions about privacy on the Internet. If electronic data exists online it is accessible to anyone with the skills to retrieve it.

I enjoyed slipping back into the familiar rhythms of Greengrass’ Bourne films – the rapid-fire editing, the kinetic, hand-held camerawork, and the intriguing critique of CIA surveillance techniques masquerading as an action thriller. It is this finger on the pulse of contemporary geopolitics and how it intersects with cutting edge technology that has made the Bourne films distinctive from the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises. I also like the personal nature of the Bourne films. He isn’t interested in saving the world from some power-hungry villain. He just wants to find out more about who he is and why he became a CIA operative, and if he puts a spanner in the works of a few of their programs then so be it.

Watching Jason Bourne makes The Bourne Legacy that much more of an unnecessary installment within the franchise both tonally and visually. Despite being written by Gilroy it never felt like it existed in the Bourne world despite the connective narrative tissue. It didn’t feel like a Bourne film but rather a simulacrum of one. Jason Bourne takes us back to this world in a way that is entertaining and is relevant to what is happening in the world today.

SOURCES

Anthony, Andrew. “Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass: ‘We’ll never say never again’” The Guardian. July 17, 2016.

Leigh, Danny. “Paul Greengrass on Matt Damon and Making it Big in Hollywood.” FT Magazine. July 21, 2016.

Manly, Lorne. “Why Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass Couldn’t Quit Jason Bourne.” The New York Times. July 12, 2016.

For Your Eyes Only

Roger Moore is my least favorite James Bond and I had the misfortune of growing up during his run in the 1980s. I saw both Octopussy (1983) and A View to a Kill (1985) in theaters and caught up with Moonraker (1979) on home video. I found Moore’s Bond too silly with too many jokes peppered throughout his movies. He lacked the cool menace of Sean Connery who was my favorite Bond. For some reason, my memories of For Your Eyes Only (1981) were foggy and it was the Moore movie I remembered the least. It was time to revisit it and see if time and perspective might change my opinion of Moore as Bond – at least as far as this movie was concerned.

After the sci-fi silliness of Moonraker (which I actually remember enjoying as a kid but alas it has not aged well), the franchise’s producers decided to dial things back and return to the style of the early Bond movies. The movie starts off on a somber note as Bond (Moore) visits the grave of his wife and is subsequently very nearly killed by a Ernst Blofeld-looking bad guy (John Hollis) via remote controlled helicopter (anticipating a similar sequence in Spectre). By the end of the prologue, the lighter tone has been restored as 007 dispatches the baddie in amusing fashion.

After a British spy boat is sunk in a harrowing sequence, Bond is tasked with recovering the onboard transmitter that can be used to order the country’s fleet of submarines to launch their nuclear missiles. In the wrong hands, it could be deadly. The British government hired a marine biologist (Jack Hedley) to locate the wreck but before he could divulge the coordinates he and his wife (Toby Robins) were brutally murdered right in front of their daughter Melina (Carole Bouquet).

It is a shocking scene as this nice couple is killed in cold blood. The camera zooms in on Melina’s eyes and it is immediately clear how this incident has instantly traumatized this poor woman. Bond is tasked with finding the Cuban hitman who did the deed and find the person who hired him. The sinking of the British boat and the murder of Melina’s parents establishes early on a decidedly darker tone than the previous Bond movie.

Bond tracks down the assassin but before he can question the man he’s killed by Melina who then saves 007 from the killer’s handler’s henchmen. I like that she not only saves Bond’s ass but also drives their getaway car with cool confidence even when being shot at because she’s got nothing left to lose.

Bond visits with Q (Desmond Llewelyn) to use the Identagraph, a “state-of-the-art” computer program that helps him identify the man he saw pay off the assassin. This sequence is laughably dated as is the absolutely horrible guitar/synthesizer-based score for the action sequences, which has to be one of the worst in the entire canon. It is even more jarring when juxtaposed with Bill Conti’s cues for the rest of the movie, which are more classically orchestrated.

Bond soon crosses paths with Aristotle Kristatos (Julian Glover), who initially seems to be an ally but turns out to be the movie’s villain – a smuggler with plans to sell the transmitter to the KGB. And so, the struggle is on for what amounts to basically a glorified keyboard, which I didn’t think about while watching the movie but in retrospect seems a bit silly.

As one would expect, For Your Eyes Only is chock-a-block with exciting action sequences, like a chase through the snowy mountains of Italy as two assassins on motorcycles pursue Bond on skis, which goes on to incorporate a ski jump and bobsledding to very dynamic effect. The choreography, especially on the bobsled portion, is top notch. In another nice nod to popular winter sports, Bond is subsequently attacked by three assassins masquerading as hockey players, giving new meaning to the term “high-sticking,” and in a sly, funny bit he dispatches them with the aid of a Zamboni, sending them into a net – a hat trick of sorts.

In addition, there’s a thrilling underwater sequence that culminates in Bond and Melina tied together and subsequently dragged behind a boat that is quite intense. It sees the duo in tangible danger. Even though we know Bond will ultimately prevail the movie doesn’t make it easy for him. The climactic assault on Kristatos’ hideout atop an abandoned mountaintop monastery not only anticipates but also puts to shame Tom Cruise’s rock-climbing stunt at the beginning of Mission: Impossible II (2000), both in terms of scale and white knuckle intensity. It’s a refreshingly unique locale, which used to be the hallmark of Bond movies.

Carole Bouquet is excellent as the revenge-obsessed Melina who will stop at nothing to avenge her parents’ deaths. It was an interesting bit of casting as the producers opted not to have someone be used merely as eye candy. The actress had some serious cinematic pedigree prior to For Your Eyes Only, appearing Luis Bunuel’s final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Bouquet has a nice scene with Moore where Bond tries to convince Melina to back off and her all-business façade breaks for a moment as the emotional impact of her parents’ demise surfaces. The range of emotions that play over Bouquet’s face is impressive. Melina is smart and more than capable of holding her own with Bond. She’s an expert deep-sea diver, aiding Bond in retrieving the transmitter from the wreck of the British spy boat.

The lovely Bouquet has nice chemistry with Moore who is his usual suave, charming self. His Bond is as cool as they come and out of his entire run it’s the one I like the most because it gets the mix just right. Moore cracks well-timed jokes but Bond is also ruthless, like when he dispatches Kristatos’ lethal henchman by pushing his disabled car off a cliff in retribution for killing a loyal contact.

For Your Eyes Only’s requisite eye candy comes in the form of cute as a button Lynn-Holly Johnson as the not-so naïve but annoying as hell ice-skating prodigy. She was actually a very proficient ice skater in real-life and parlayed that into the much-beloved drama Ice Castles (1978). She awkwardly tries to seduce Bond, which he has the decency to fend off politely as there is more than a bit of an age difference. Julian Glover is a bit of a bland Bond villain and there isn’t really a feeling of urgency in stopping his plans as in other movies. His baddie also lacks a distinctive personality and is quite frankly forgettable.

Melina’s revenge mission gives For Your Eyes Only a little more emotional weight than a Bond movie would normally have and a significant supporting character has a very personal stake in the outcome. The filmmakers wisely dial back the humor so that there is a better mix of exciting action sequences with the requisite Bond one-liners (“He had no head for heights.”) and Melina’s serious revenge trip mixed with beautiful women, thrilling chase sequences, exotic locales, tough-as-nails henchmen, and Bond trying to save the world from a rich villain. This movie doesn’t change my opinion of Moore in the pantheon of actors that have played Bond – he’s still my least favorite – but I thought he did an excellent job in For Your Eyes Only and it is by far his strongest outing in the role.

The Bourne Ultimatum

After two films with Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) on the defensive and on the run, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) sees our hero going on the offensive and taking the fight to his handlers. Coming full circle not only thematically, but also on a production level – the film was born out of chaos as principal photography began without a completed screenplay – it managed to come out the other side with a coherent final product that endeared itself to both audiences and critics. Ultimatum not only avoids the dreaded third installment of a trilogy jinx (they are notoriously the weakest), but ends up being the strongest one of the series as Bourne gets some definitive answers to who he is and his past.

Ultimatum picks up right where The Bourne Supremacy (2004) left off with Bourne on the run in Moscow after being seriously injured in an exciting car chase with a fellow Treadstone assassin. Meanwhile, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), an investigative reporter with The Guardian, a British newspaper, is working on a story about Bourne and a top-secret CIA operation known as Blackbriar. Naturally, the agency finds out and puts Ross under surveillance in the hopes that Bourne will contact him, which he does, at a busy London train station.

Bourne’s rendezvous with Ross amidst the hustle and bustle of the train station is a nice homage to the opening of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) as the two men are heavily scrutinized by all kinds of CIA surveillance. There is a lot of fun to be had watching Bourne masterfully evade all their manpower and hi-tech equipment in a wonderfully intense and insanely choreographed sequence that successfully ratchets up the tension as the CIA closes in. However, before Bourne can get Ross to reveal his source, an extremely efficient Blackbriar assassin (Edgar Ramirez) kills the journalist and disappears like a ghost.

Fortunately, Bourne takes Ross’ notes and figures out that the source is located in Madrid. During the course of his investigation, Bourne is reunited with Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), a CIA operative sympathetic to his plight. Within the agency, the man in charge of Blackbriar, CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) wants Bourne dead because he sees him as a dangerous liability while another agent, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), wants to take him alive because she doesn’t agree with Vosen’s methods. This results in some wonderfully testy bickering between the two actors as they argue over what to do about Bourne. The rest of Ultimatum plays out as a brilliantly staged cat and mouse game with Bourne turning the tables on his handlers.

This time around, David Strathairn is the veteran character actor enlisted to play the CIA honcho tasked to find and eliminate Bourne. Like Chris Cooper (The Bourne Identity) and Brian Cox (The Bourne Supremacy) before him, he has the gravitas to play a take-charge authority figure and part of the enjoyment of this film is watching Bourne constantly thwart Vosen’s plans. In Ultimatum, Landy is a more sympathetic figure as she wants to capture Bourne alive (unlike Vosen). As the film progresses and she learns more about what the United States government did to Bourne and others in Treadstone, she realizes that she can no longer be complicit in the CIA’s illegal activities. Nicky Parsons also undergoes significant development as she ends up helping Bourne and turns out to be a key figure in his past.

Paul Greengrass, who also directed Supremacy, is back behind the camera bringing his trademark, no-nonsense pacing and visceral, hand-held camerawork to Ultimatum. The film’s action sequences are the epitome of edgy intensity as the fight scenes are quick and as brutal as a PG-13 rating will allow. They are realistically depicted – after all, guys as well trained as Bourne don’t waste any time and know exactly how to bring someone down as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

Like with the other Bourne films, Ultimatum also has exciting chases, including the police pursuing Bourne over rooftops in Tangiers while he’s chasing an assassin going after Nicky, and a crazy car chase through the busy streets of New York City. Greengrass and his stunt people upped the ante on the chases, most notably the sequence in Tangiers, which starts off with scooters in the busy streets and then after a car bomb goes off, along rooftops on foot. Greengrass’ kinetic camerawork is taken to the next level as we literally follow Bourne leaping through the air from one building to another.

The lo-tech versus hi-tech dichotomy is beautifully realized in all three Bourne films as symbolized in the way he kills the highly trained assassins sent to kill him. In The Bourne Identity (2002), it’s with a pen, in Supremacy it’s with a rolled up magazine and in Ultimatum it’s with a book. The films never make a big deal about it and even show how well Bourne can manipulate technology, but his best chance at survival is to MacGyver it and stay off the grid.

With the phenomenal success of The Bourne Supremacy, Universal Pictures persuaded screenwriter Tony Gilroy to write the first draft of The Bourne Ultimatum for a significant amount of money, but only under the conditions that he could leave after its completion and that he wouldn’t have to speak with director Paul Greengrass, who was also returning, and did not get along with the writer. According to Damon, “It’s really the studio’s fault for putting themselves in that position. I don’t blame Tony for taking a boatload of money and handing in what he handed in. It’s just that it was unreadable. This is a career-ender.”

After Gilroy left the project and a release date looming, Greengrass brought in four other writers including George Nolfi, Scott Z. Burns, and Tom Stoppard, the latter who said of his input: “Some of the themes are still mine—but I don’t think there’s a single word of mine in the film.” Amazingly, before the film’s release date, Gilroy arbitrated and lost to get sole credit. As a result, the filmmakers were writing the script as they were making the film over three continents in 140 shooting days. According to Damon, “There wasn’t a single day where we didn’t have new pages! The main issue was that a question was never answered: Why was Bourne here? … What Paul settled on was that it has to be a story about meeting his maker.”

The exciting chase through the streets of Tangiers was an homage to Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966). It took 14 days to shoot with Bourne’s rooftop leap done by a stuntman jumping right behind Bourne while carrying a small, lightweight camera. According to second unit director and stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, he often allowed the stunt people to hold the cameras because “they’re not too freaked out about getting hit or sliding under something while holding a camera. Some of the best shots in Supremacy and Ultimatum are because the stunt guys were operating.” Once again, Greengrass applied an independent film aesthetic to a big studio movie budget or, as he put it, “one of the ways you do it is to try your luck and set the action in places where you can’t behave like a big movie … You’re forced to sort of be a bit like a student film and make it up as you go along, live on the land and shoot when people are around.”

The Bourne Ultimatum received mostly positive reviews from mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Greengrass’ direction: “He not only creates (or seems to create) amazingly long takes but does it without calling attention to them. Whether they actually are unbroken stretches of film or are spliced together by invisible wipes, what counts is that they present such mind-blowing action that I forgot to keep track.” In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Bourne is now very much a man alone, existentially and otherwise. Mr. Damon makes him haunted, brooding and dark. The light seems to have gone out in his eyes, and the skin stretches so tightly across his cantilevered cheekbones that you can see the outline of his skull, its macabre silhouette. He looks like death in more ways than one.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The Bourne Ultimatum is a spectacular windup toy of a thriller – a contraption made by an artist.” In her review for the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano wrote, “Damon lends an air of conscious integrity to the part, a quality of reflective introspection that acts as an amazingly effective ballast against the complete implausibility of his continued survival.”

However, Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “Greengrass cuts each action scene into agitated bits; but he can’t let fast enough alone. Could he please explain why, in the chat scenes, the camera is afflicted with Parkinson’s? The film frame trembles, obscures the speaker with the listener’s shoulder, annoys viewers and distracts them from the content of the scene.” The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote, “It’s not a movie; it’s a trip through a gun barrel at the head of a cloud of exploding gas, and you end up splattered against a wall, then sliding into the dust with the sound of the drums ringing in your head for hours.”

If Identity was about our hero escaping from his CIA handlers and Supremacy was about him figuring out why they are still after him, then Ultimatum is all about getting revenge on those responsible for messing up his life in the first place and figuring out, once and for all, his identity. What elevates Ultimatum (and the rest of the series) above, say, the Mission: Impossible movies, is that it is more than just an exciting thriller (although, it does work on that level). It is also has a sharp, political component in the form of a scathing critique of the CIA’s dirty little secrets. The series ultimately asks, what happens when a highly-trained and conditioned government operative questions what he does and why? How does he undo the programming that made him what he is and come to grips with what he’s done? This film answers these questions to a satisfying degree while also being very entertaining conclusion to the series.

SOURCES

Carnevale, Rob. “The Bourne Ultimatum – Paul Greengrass Interview.” indieLONDON. 2007.

Crabtree, Sheigh. “When He Calls ‘Action,’ He Means It.” Los Angeles Times. August 5, 2007.

Max, D.T. “Twister.” The New Yorker. March 16, 2009.

Nashawaty, Chris. “The Strong Violent Type.” Entertainment Weekly. August 6, 2007.

Rapkin, Mickey. “Tom Stoppard.” Time Out New York. October 18, 2007.

Thompson, Anne. “Greengrass Brings Auds Into Picture.” Variety. August 3, 2007.

Wallace, Amy. “Wicked Smaht.” GQ. January 2012.