It was “cheapskate” Tuesday and after a day of writing and writing in work, I went with a couple of friends and get the cheap $9 tickets to watch Bourne Ultimatum in Greater Union in CBD.
Personally I am a fan of the whole Bourne series - not exactly for the action details (after all, I am from Hong Kong and we have seen the best Kung-fu action stuff back in the 80s/90s), but rather the suspense and the twist of the super-secret CIA operations.
The latest and the supposedly-final-episode of the series, Bourne Ultimatum, is I think the best of the whole series. I would not go into the plots, but I can say that during the movie there were a lot of twists and “a-ha” moments. Especially the way the story was continued from Bourne Supremacy to Bourne Ultimatum is very smart and neat.
The plot and more descriptions of the movie is at Wikipedia and trivia and goofs are on IMDB.
There are the usual Kung-Fu actions, explosions, trademarked car chasing scenes and last but not least, the bystanders getting affected by the car crashes, explosions, stolen properties, fire-shots caused by all the CIA and Bourne actions. There is a mystery to me - how does Bourne get all the money needed to survive and travel around the world?
Anyway, I give this movie is definitely a 90%+ rating, and hope that there will be new movies in the whole Bourne franchise. I strongly recommend you to watch Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy first to enjoy the finale of this trilogy.
From a geek point of view, the whole Bourne series do not dig into the technologies in details. Although the FBI or CIA in the movie uses the state of the art technologies to tap into phones, track wirelessly through GPS/satellite, Bourne himself usually just goes into an Internet cafe and search for info and that’s about it in terms of computer interaction. These are some real-world brands and technologies I noticed:
Google - Bourne uses Google to search
Google Maps - The CIA uses similar maps - or most likely since they are derived from Keyhole Inc
HP monitors - Seems like they are the standard CIA equipments…
MMS for communicating with “assets” or assassins to assign tasks, e.g. who to kill.
Motorola - Everyone, good or bad, uses Motorola mobile phones apparently. Bourne got a nice Motorola Razr prepaid phone for one of the rather short-lived acquaintance. I don’t remember I saw any blackberry though?
IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad - The agent Julia Stiles is playing seems to take a Thinkpad out of her bag?
It’s an industrial hazard that I took notice anything technological when watching movie…
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