The still-unnamed fifth installment of the Bourne franchise will feature a memory-restored Jason Bourne who is still looking for answers, according to a recent interview with recast frontman Matt Damon in the NY Daily News.
The star, who co-wrote the script for his Bourne reprisal, teased the plot to the upcoming film, saying, “[Jason Bourne] has his memory back, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything. It’s 12 years since Jason Bourne has been on the grid. So we have to answer the questions, Where’s he been? What’s he doing? What gets him going again? So once we solved all that, then we had a movie.”
Damon, who had the leading role in the first three film adaptations of Robert Ludlum’s best-selling spy novels — The Bourne Identity, Ultimatum, and Supremacy — opted out of the fourth film, The Bourne Legacy, over artistic differences with Universal Studios. It wasn’t until recently that he decided to rejoin the franchise for its upcoming fifth iteration.
An Oscar award-winning screenwriter himself, Damon helped craft the new script with writer Christopher Rouse and writer/director Paul Greenglass, who was involved with the Ultimatum and Supremacy films, and similarly opted out of the Legacy project. Julia Stiles is also set to re-join the film series, where she will return to her role as ex-CIA agent Nicky Parsons.
With such clear divides in personnel between the original trilogy and Legacy, it remains to be seen how much of that film’s plot will be reflected in Bourne movie number five. Most likely, any references to that series of events will remain firmly in the background.
However the story unfolds, Damon has previously hinted that the film will take place in a “post-Snowden” Europe.
Maybe that means the document dumps will have someone after Mr. Bourne, or maybe Bourne learns the location of an old foe, and endeavors to settle the score. Either way, fans of the wildly-successful first three films should be comforted that the franchise is back in good hands.
