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The final film for this series I had not seen previously is The Bourne Ultimatum. Since I saw the first two films in the series, you'd have thought I'd have continued with this one. But I didn't really like those films, which is no surprise because spy movies, generally, do not do a whole lot for me. In fact, I wrote a whole post sort of inspired by this series called "Series I've abandoned." If you want to read that post, it's here.
Understanding Editing is prompting me to de-abandon the Bourne movies, though I still don't plan to put The Bourne Legacy or Jason Bourne on my watchlist any time soon. You see, The Bourne Ultimatum won an Oscar for its editing in 2007, making it the most recent best editing winner that I hadn't seen. If you want to know now which is the most recent I haven't seen, you have to go all the way back to the 1960s with Z in 1969.
I was happy to choose this movie because it was not, like some of the other films in this series, a film I could say might have only won the editing Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars. That should mean that the editing here is being specifically isolated for praise. This is not, though, the only Oscar won by The Bourne Ultimatum. It also won two trophies that are related to the best editing Oscar, best sound mixing and best sound editing. I don't think those are still two separate categories.
And unlike some other films in this series, it isn't difficult to determine why this film was honored for its editing, at the very least because it could win the Oscar for "most editing," if such an Oscar existed.
I sometimes think of the first decade of the 21st century as a time not dissimilar enough from 2025 to warrant calling it a different era. It may just be that we don't have a lot of nostalgic forms of entertainment that speak specifically to that time. Only in the past few years, I would argue, have we really start to sentimentalize the 1990s, and we may not have gotten there yet with the 2000's. So I still sort of think of it as essentially "now," even though 2007 was 18 years ago.
It's movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th I watched a few weeks ago, that remind me that this was, indeed, quite a different time.
For one, 2007 appears to be the height of "shaky cam," a favored approach of director Paul Greengrass, which was also popular among many other filmmakers at the time. I can't remember the last time I've seen shaky cam in a new movie, though there may be people who still use it. It was also big in shows like The Office, of course, and for a time, we loved the apparent verisimilitude it brought to what we were watching.
That time is definitely over. As I was watching The Bourne Ultimatum, I kept on thinking to myself how silly it was that the camera is moving -- maybe only a little bit, but still moving -- in scenes even where there is not any sort of kinetic action whatsoever. At the time this felt gritty, but nowadays I don't like it. And no, it's not because I have any sort of issues with motion sickness, I just think it's a lame relic of its time that was probably never a great idea.
Add in all the crazy editing, and you just have a non-stop dervish of a film that can manage to impress you on a basic technical level while still being unpleasant to watch.
The crazy editing, though, is pretty impressive in and of itself. So let's first of all talk about who did it.
The editor is Christopher Rouse, and this is his only Oscar. He made six films with Greengrass, the last of which was Jason Bourne in 2016. He was also Oscar nominated for United 93 the year before this, far and away my favorite Greengrass film, and far and a way the most vital use of both shaky cam and Rouse's editing style. More recently he edited IF for John Krasinski, in which we no longer see evidence of this style, if it was ever really properly characterized as a signature for him.
The thing Rouse does that's so impressive is that he captures movement within a scene with a fast succession of quick edits, maybe as many as ten over five seconds of screen time. A succession like this can get Jason Bourne up a set of stairs and around a corner in a bunch of half-second shots that are just fast enough to get the job done quickly but just slow enough to allow for a certain continuity within the viewing experience. He's fast without seeming herky jerky, which is kind of the definition of what we look for in superlative editing.
Needless to say, this approach also pays dividends in fight scenes, where we can see two guys thrown around an apartment, and the various jabs and lunges thrown at one another, without having to linger on any one part of the fight. At worst, this approach is visually incomprehensible, but Rouse pulls it off in a way where we always maintain an understanding of the fight's spatial dynamics while being inevitably excited by the pace of it all.
The thing that may be impressive for other editors, if I'm guessing, is that each cut probably only uses a small fraction of the shot the DP took. While many instances of editing use most of the take, and the skill is in deciding how soon to cut in on the shot and when to cut away from it, Rouse is using only the most representative sliver of each take to forward the action. And from where I sat, he did this very well.
Does that mean I liked watching this movie? No it does not.
Look I'm already not a fan of the Bourne movies, and I did not expect this movie to change my mind. But I think I actually liked it least of the three I've seen, to the extent that I remember the other ones. That runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that this might be the best of the original three, which started out with Doug Liman's original movie before Greengrass took the reins from him.
If I needed to summarize this movie, it would be thus:
"Jason Bourne ducks in and out of corners of a city while stressed out CIA operators behind closed doors bark orders about how to find him."
That's it. That's the entire plot of this movie, as far as I can tell.
In looking at the plot synopsis now on Wikipedia, I have determined that there are at least three different cities depicted here, maybe as many as four. Yes, that's four: Moscow, London, Turin and New York. The fact that I don't remember Bourne transitioning between any of these cities tells you how samey everything felt, how much I thought of the movie, and ultimately, by the end, how much I was actually paying attention to it.
Okay I've got one more of these left. In December I will revisit The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- the Fincher version, obviously, as that was the one that won the Oscar. I'm especially interested to appreciate how an excellent technician like Fincher gets the most out of an editor.
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