On a stormy night, a young man is pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea by the crew of a fishing boat. Thinking the young man is dead, a curious fisherman with a scalpel finds two bullets in his back and a miniature laser device in his hip. The laser reveals a Swiss bank account number. But our wet hero isn't dead, and soon finds himself in Zurich. In the bank vault the young man discovers his name, Jason Bourne. In addition, he finds a baffling pile of different passports, all with his picture, and a huge pile of cash. In the U.S. Embassy, Jason Bourne discovers his love interest and travel partner, Marie, along with the fact that someone wants to kill him. Armed with a bag of money and mysterious martial arts skills, with Marie by his side, Bourne scours Paris for clues about his identity and past life... and finds himself in the middle of two assassination plots masterminded by the CIA.
Yeah. Allow me to discuss the concept of "sticking to the book."
I hate it when Hollywood attempts to "improve" a story. It never, ever works. TBI is a perfect example. To understand why, let me talk for a minute about the novel.
In the novel, Bourne has amnesia because he has been shot in the head. In the movie, he's been shot in the back of his shoulder - traumatic, granted, but not likely to induce memory loss.
In the book, Bourne is a fake assassin - his organization has him undercover posing as an assassin in an attempt to draw out a real assassin. When he loses his memory, his own agency tries to kill him, because they think he's lost his mind and bought into his own cover story. In the movie? No cover, he is an assassin, and his agency goes after him for no clearly defined reason. They've "lost contact," so he must be a bad guy. Very sensible.
In the novel, the woman who becomes his accomplice is a Canadian economist - I know, oxymoron, but still - who he takes hostage to escape from some police in Zurich. In the movie, she's an ex-patriate American "gypsy" living from friend to friend in Europe. Not plot-crucial, I suppose, but why change it? There wasn't really a reason to.
The problem is not that TBI is a bad movie - on the contrary, it's pretty good - but rather that it has almost no relationship whatsoever to the book. You should buy it for action, certainly; just don't do so thinking that you're getting a film version of the book. I've barely scratched the surface of the differences, which are profound.
The worst element of this is that they made a sequel - The Bourne Supremacy. Why is this bad? Well, in the novel TBI, Bourne was recruited after some bad things happened to him in Vietnam. While his time in Southeast Asia is barely touched on in the first book, the ENTIRE SECOND NOVEL is set in Southeast Asia, and the whole plot depends on the events of the first book, and the events which took place in Asia prior to the events chronicled in TBI. Having left all these plot elements conveniently out of the first movie, how in the hell can you make a movie of the second novel at all?
TBI is a good movie. Just disregard the title entirely, and consider it a separate, discrete entity. If you want a film version of TBI that's in accord with the novel, try the 1988 TV miniseries, starring Richard Chamberlain, instead. It's vastly superior.
