'The Bourne Identity'
'The Bourne Identity' is a 2002 spy/action thriller hybrid which is my favourite Thriller film. It stars Matt Damon, a popular and well known thriller actor, this is a clever casting choice by the director, Doug Liman as Matt Damon is a big Hollywood name and this will therefore generate interest from the audience as he is such a popular actor. Damon plays a CIA agent who is shot unconscious, losing his memory and the film centres around him trying to discover who he is, whilst being hunted by the CIA who are afraid that he will divulge
confidential information. It is a typical thriller in that it is very fast paced, there is lots of suspense and violence so it conforms to the expectations of the genre whilst having a strong storyline alongside the action.
From the trailer the audience can immediately tell that this is the trailer for a thriller film as within 18 seconds of the clip starting there is an violent - action sequence which uses the editing technique of cross cutting to show the flow of the action, to build tension quickly and to identify the protagonist (Jason Bourne) from the antagonists (the CIA in this case). Moreover, the trailer displays typical iconography of the thriller genre, such as guns, violence, an element of a chase, danger for the protagonist and clothing which is representative of the mood and the role of the character.
The Bourne Identity
Verdict
Nothing in The Bourne Identity stands up to close examination, but that doesn't stop it being a rollicking blockbuster ride and perfect Saturday night fodder. Spectacular stunts, enough twists and turns to keep the audience guessing, and Matt Damon delivering as an action hero.
Reviewed by Emma Cochrane
The following is a review of 'The Bourne Identity' by the British film magazine 'Empire'.
The Bourne Identity
Matt Damon transforms into an action hard-man with no memory of his past and a government agency out to get him.
Plot
A bullet-ridden amnesiac is rescued from drowning by a fishing trawler, only to find himself the unwitting target of enemies. Is he really the ruthless assassin they think he is? And will he even live long enough to figure it out?
A bullet-ridden amnesiac is rescued from drowning by a fishing trawler, only to find himself the unwitting target of enemies. Is he really the ruthless assassin they think he is? And will he even live long enough to figure it out?
Review
With a two-year shooting schedule, a script that was redrafted more times than the cast care to remember, and Matt Damon making at least two movies (Ocean's 11 and Spirit) in the middle of all that mess, this thriller comes to the cinemas as much a marked man as its central character. Some of the joins do show, especially towards the end of the film, when a couple of minor characters disappear completely, but by then it has been too much fun to start picking holes.
From the moment Jason Bourne (an excellent Matt Damon) discovers his true powers - taking out in blistering style two cops who accuse him of loitering - a new hero is created. Damon plays Bourne as a man of cat-like instinct; he can make a weapon out of a fountain pen and sense danger at the most innocent of signals.
On the run across Europe with beatnik Potente, his quest to find himself becomes more involving since he is the opposite in nature to his physical appearance. This blue-eyed, innocent-looking American wants to be just that - and yet, much to his horror, he can't help using calculated efficiency to dispose of anyone who represents a challenge to him.
Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) seemed an unlikely choice as an action director, but his hand-held camera style and the improvisational work he does with actors clearly paid dividends here. However ridiculous the situation (and there are some extremely ridiculous situations), he maintains an air of heightened realism about his treatment of Bourne's predicament.
Pumped-up sound effects add to the gruesomeness of the fight sequences. Listen for that moment when the pen is pulled out of a would-be assailant's hand - it's a beaut! For once, a sequel would be welcome.
With a two-year shooting schedule, a script that was redrafted more times than the cast care to remember, and Matt Damon making at least two movies (Ocean's 11 and Spirit) in the middle of all that mess, this thriller comes to the cinemas as much a marked man as its central character. Some of the joins do show, especially towards the end of the film, when a couple of minor characters disappear completely, but by then it has been too much fun to start picking holes.
From the moment Jason Bourne (an excellent Matt Damon) discovers his true powers - taking out in blistering style two cops who accuse him of loitering - a new hero is created. Damon plays Bourne as a man of cat-like instinct; he can make a weapon out of a fountain pen and sense danger at the most innocent of signals.
On the run across Europe with beatnik Potente, his quest to find himself becomes more involving since he is the opposite in nature to his physical appearance. This blue-eyed, innocent-looking American wants to be just that - and yet, much to his horror, he can't help using calculated efficiency to dispose of anyone who represents a challenge to him.
Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) seemed an unlikely choice as an action director, but his hand-held camera style and the improvisational work he does with actors clearly paid dividends here. However ridiculous the situation (and there are some extremely ridiculous situations), he maintains an air of heightened realism about his treatment of Bourne's predicament.
Pumped-up sound effects add to the gruesomeness of the fight sequences. Listen for that moment when the pen is pulled out of a would-be assailant's hand - it's a beaut! For once, a sequel would be welcome.
Verdict
Nothing in The Bourne Identity stands up to close examination, but that doesn't stop it being a rollicking blockbuster ride and perfect Saturday night fodder. Spectacular stunts, enough twists and turns to keep the audience guessing, and Matt Damon delivering as an action hero.
Reviewed by Emma Cochrane
'Rebecca'
The 1940 Psychological thriller, 'Rebecca' is one of my favourite thriller films, it is a classic retelling of Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel of the same name. 'Rebecca' is a totally different type of thriller to 'The Bourne Identity' and the audience will notice a stark contrast between the two. Whilst 'The Bourne Identity' is heavily action based, and therefore the script and storyline are less prominent, the total opposite could be said for 'Rebecca'. 'Rebecca' is a psychological thriller, the suspense building slowly throughout the film, putting the audience on edge as the storyline unravels, unlike the 'Bourne' films whereby there is a high level of tension due to the action from the offset. 'Rebecca' centres around the mysterious Maximilian de Winter, an older gentlemen whom the heroine of the story falls in love with, on marrying Maxim and moving to the home he shared with his now deceased wife, Rebecca, the new Mrs. de Winter must try to overcome the obstacles that Rebecca's memories have left. In particular Rebecca's oldest confidante, and coincidentally housekeeper - the terrifying Mrs. Danvers.
From my research into my favourite thriller films and what makes them so appealing to me, I have deduced that lots of dark and light imagery helps to convey a lot about the situation and the nature of the characters, I have also seen that you do not necessarily always need to have a film in colour for it to be powerful, in fact the use of shadows can intensify a scene and convey danger very effectively. After reviewing this I have decided to consider possibly using black and white within my own thriller opening.
The audience immediately notices that the film is in black and white from the trailer, this is a deliberate choice by the director, Alfred Hitchcock as although the film was released in 1940, there had been full length feature films in colour, therefore Hitchcock has made the decision to use black and white purposefully. I believe that Hitchcock has made the choice to have the film in black and white as it creates a far more sinister feel than colour would.
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| Mrs. de Winter and Mrs. Danvers |
Moreover, the use of dark and light are emphasised in 'Rebecca' and their connotation regarding good and evil are a key theme in the film, something that would not be conveyed as strongly in colour. To the same extent Hitchcock has intentionally exaggerated the use of shadows within the film, especially in scenes such as the image to the right which contain Mrs. de Winter and Mrs Danvers only, in order to connote Mrs. de Winter's distress and build suspense, as the audience associates Mrs. Danvers with shadows, darkness and evil - thus she becomes an object of fear to the audience. Like Doug Liman,
Alfred Hitchcock has been very selective in his casting, Laurence Olivier was one of the biggest Hollywood names and therefore his presence in the film would create a lot of interest and attract a wide audience, however Joan Fontaine had not previously been in any successful films and her role in 'Rebecca' was the defining one of her career.
The following is an article reviewing the film 'Rebecca' by the online version of the newspaper, 'The Guardian'.
Alfred Hitchcock has been very selective in his casting, Laurence Olivier was one of the biggest Hollywood names and therefore his presence in the film would create a lot of interest and attract a wide audience, however Joan Fontaine had not previously been in any successful films and her role in 'Rebecca' was the defining one of her career.
The following is an article reviewing the film 'Rebecca' by the online version of the newspaper, 'The Guardian'.
My favourite Hitchcock: Rebecca
The director had to remove the one murder that takes place in Daphne du Maurier's story – but still created one of his creepiest, most oppressive film
Unhappy families … Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in Hitchcock's Rebecca. Photograph: 20th Century Fox
Everyone who loves film knows the opening words of Rebecca, that astonishing mixture of emotional hothouse and freezer that was Hitchcock's first American film, made for David O Selznick and released in 1940. But for all the portent of that opening voiceover, or the symbolic drama of the great Cornish mansion burning down as the film ends, it's not about a place. It's not really a thriller, either, in any meaningful sense – despite the suspense of the closing reel.
Rebecca is a film about abusive relationships, and the way power might shift within them – and, most unusually, even for its time – its hero is the worst of the abusers. The romantic might viewLaurence Olivier's Max de Winter as someone haunted by his past; the realist would see him as someone haunted only by his inability to control his past, specifically his titular deceased wife, and so he alights upon Joan Fontaine's gauche, clumsy (and nameless) gentlewoman's companion as a wife who will give him no trouble.
Briefly, Fontaine has accompanied the ghastly Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates) to Monte Carlo as her paid companion. There she meets de Winter, a dark and brooding widower, prone to staring moodily over cliff edges and contemplating death.
After a whirlwind romance – much of which consists of him admonishing her in tones that would see any modern man dumped on the spot (his proposal: "I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool") – they marry and return to his ancestral home, where Rebecca's old personal maid, Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson, portraying a Miss Gulch of the servant class), makes the second Mrs de Winter's life a misery.
Rebecca was one of three films Hitchcock adapted from stories byDaphne du Maurier, and much the most successful. Du Maurier had been distressed by the liberties he took with Jamaica Inn; The Birdssuffered in being transformed from a perfect, ever-tightening noose of a short story set in Cornwall into an expansive movie set on the California coast. Rebecca's near fidelity is owed to Selznick, who was "shocked and disappointed beyond words" at Hitchcock's first treatment of the story and told the director: "We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca."
The only significant departure from the novel was unavoidable. Du Maurier made Max de Winter a murderer: he killed Rebecca in rage at her affairs (feminist readings of the story posit her as its heroine; any modern reader will view her sympathetically the more they see of her husband). The Hollywood Production Code, however, could not allow a murderer to escape unpunished and so an accidental death had to be engineered. Clumsy it might have been, but because that plotline is tacked on at the end, it doesn't interfere with the mighty central pillar of the film: the desperate, suffocating, co-dependent relationships of Mr and Mrs de Winter, Mrs Danvers and Rebecca.
Reliant though the film is on dialogue, Hitchcock throws in those inimitable visual touches, too: Max staring over the cliffs to the Mediterranean, the sea swirling sickeningly beneath him, showing us his death wish; his sister explaining to the second Mrs de Winter how much Mrs Danvers loved Rebecca, and the screen fading to black behind Fontaine's face, a startling representation of the fall in your stomach when you hear something you have dreaded. And, of course, that critical, crippling moment when Fontaine descends the grand staircase to the Manderley masquerade ball, having been tricked by Mrs Danvers into wearing a replica of one of Rebecca's old gowns.
The reason Rebecca still grips lies in the fact that we can all see ourselves in Fontaine's role: everyone plunged into a new and unfamiliar milieu has felt her uncertainty and fear that they are the wrong person, in the wrong place. We have all had relationships in which we cannot be sure where the ground lies, in which the dynamics of power leave us isolated and clinging desperately to whatever fixed points we can find.
"Our marriage is a success, isn't it? A great success? We're happy, aren't we? Terribly happy?" Fontaine asks Olivier halfway through the film. He turns and strolls away from her. She continues, the note of desperate hope gone from her voice. "If you don't think we are happy, it would be much better if you didn't pretend." By now she's almost whispering. "I'll go away. Why won't you answer me?" And there, in those few seconds of speech, is the most human, heartbreakingly vulnerable person ever to appear in a Hitchcock film.
Sources: YouTube, Google Images, Wiki, empireonline.com, theguardian.com, nytimes.com
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