Tony Gilroy, so desperate along with Universal Studios,
to continue the cash cow of the Jason Bourne film series that he personally
crafted and adapted from books to films, went ahead with a fourth film even
after Matt Damon, the series’ eponymous hero, bowed out. How can you have a
Bourne film without Bourne? They could have decided to make it something like
the Bond series, replacing the actor periodically as they age out of the role,
providing the character contemporary problems to confront. But then it would
have run the risk of copycat syndrome, I guess. So instead Gilroy, with the
help of his brother Dan, decided with The
Bourne Legacy to keep it all in the same universe, but provide a new
protagonist in Aaron Cross, a super-assassin involved in a program similar to
the Treadstone project that created Bourne. It’s an expansion of the Robert
Ludlum series of books, taking the title, but nothing of the story, from the
fourth book, which wasn’t even written by Ludlum. Confused? It doesn’t matter
because The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum had already
deviated far from Ludlum’s novels.
