Missing



Our summer movie watching activity added another new release to the list, Bourne Supremacy. It was the sequel to Bourne Identity which I think is an awesome spy movie.



In Supremacy, Bourne's girlfriend whom he met during his escape in Geneva was killed by an awesome long-range shot across some paddy field in India. Hitman was paid by a Russian oil tycoon. Pretty sad because she was a leading actress in the first movie and now she's dead in less than 10 minutes into the movie. Bourne was of course was mad angry and the story is about him trying to piece the jigsaw and eventually kill the assassin. So, he went to Europe and the actions were mainly in Berlin and towards the end, in Moscow. There's one scene where Bourne paid a visit to a fellow CIA hitman and killed him. I had hoped that both of them would work together against the CIA but eventually the hitmen only worked on their own.



The charm of these movies is that they are out to impress us the audience especially those loves spy fantasies. It's the way these hitmen live that impressed me a lot. They act based on instructions sent via text messages. They carry sniper guns like an angler carries his fishing rod. Their marksmanship is just awesome. In Identity, Bourne killed another sniper at long range using a shotgun rifle (is there such weapon... it looked like a long shotgun). More impressive was their insane driving skills. There's Ronin-like traits in these two movies.



But why American spy movies are always shot in Europe? The Cold War ended more than a decade ago and most of the former Eastern Bloc are now even members of NATO. Maybe producing spy movies on current military threats like on wars against terrorism is too much of a risk for the producers. Even though the Bourne movies have no explicit mentionings of communism or the KGB, still the impression that I get from seeing the drama unfolding in Berlin and Moscow just gives me that traditional perception that spying is only against the Russians. I think spying against the current terrorists is harder since the obvious difference in skin color.



During the weeks before I came to the States for my freshman year, I half-read a book about the life of a former CIA agent who was in the midst of the middle East turmoil of the late 1980s especially in Lebanon. Holywood should produce movies based on such stories and not just popularize the long-gone tension between the Western world and the Russians. Probably they should also produce spy movies based on Latin America too. Spy games (Robert Redford and Brad Pitt) had a good mix of espionage scenes from all over the world. It had Lebanon and East Germany included.



Anyway, spy movies are there to satisfy our spy fantasies. These kinds of adventures do not happen to most of us everyday. I wish it happens to me sometimes but I actually shouldn't wish for it to really happen. I might not live to see 30 and even "mati katak" or die like a frog. These kind of movie are just means for us to escape the world that can sometimes be a little too mundane.