Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Bourne Legacy
2012 · Tony Gilroy · The Bourne Legacy on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Cross count the colored capsules in his vial. (setting)
The most capable body in the film rests on a dose. Renner plays Cross as a man afraid of losing his sharpness, and the plot keeps returning to how many pills are left and where the next ones come from.
Payoff: The super-soldier idea gets rewritten as dependency. His talent is rented from a laboratory and can be repossessed. In the reading: fetish (part-object charged with compulsive force). The reading calls the chems a fetish: a small object carrying compulsive force that the whole story organizes itself around.
Notice you can follow the geography during the action. (camera)
Robert Elswit shoots with stable framing, depth and readable space, on film rather than the jittery handheld the earlier entries used. The Alaska opening gives the wilderness real landscape scale.
Payoff: The body has never been more legible in this franchise. You always know where Cross is, which makes it clearer how little that helps him.
Count the cuts back to the men watching screens in a room. (cutting)
John Gilroy alternates the running operative with administrators deliberating around a table. The rooms get long stretches of dialogue and procedure, and the film keeps giving them priority over the chase.
Payoff: The decisions that matter are made at desks. The film cuts to the deliberating system as often as to the man being hunted. In the reading: cinema of the brain. The reading calls these rooms a cinema of the brain: the screen becomes a model of a system weighing outcomes.
Watch Edward Norton stay calm and never raise a hand. (performance)
Byer is a retired officer brought in to manage liability. Norton plays him in clipped, reasonable sentences, explaining why a program and everyone in it has to be closed down.
Payoff: There is no villain to fight here. The opposing force is a procedure, and it is being carried out by people who think they are being responsible.
Compare the Alaskan wilderness to the sterile laboratory rooms. (staging)
The film keeps two worlds apart: a lone body against ice and forest, and screen-lined interiors under cool controlled light. Medical examinations and testing sit in the second world.
Payoff: One world shows what the program produced. The other shows what produced it, and Gilroy is far more interested in the second.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the cuts to the conference rooms. The man on the motorcycle is magnificent and not where the power is.