Where action scenes were once captured in wide-angle with most of the body in the frame to improve the clarity of the moment, in The Bourne Identity, they are choppy, swift and nimble thanks to unstable, close up cinematography and a rapidly cut edit. Based on the book by Robert Ludlum, Liman’s film, starring Matt Damon in the lead role, established a stark vision for the future of action set-pieces, capturing hand-to-hand combat with snappy, frenetic energy. The film’s story is ripped from the playbook of action filmmaking, following a man discovered by a fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea, riddled with bullets and suffering from amnesia, who is forced to evade multiple assassinations whilst regaining recollection of his past. Though come the turn of the millennium, these films would quickly look dated and part of a more innocent time for cinema before the rise of the internet, in its place would grow a far grittier approach to action filmmaking. Just look at the Batman series during the 1990s, with Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin both showing off colourful, cartoony styles to service their eccentric plotlines. Where, in the 1980s, a star-studded male lead would take the helm in a variety of bombastic scenarios, from Die Hard to The Terminator, the 1990s shifted from a focus on an individual star, pumping money instead into an outlandish central plot. Like all genre films, action cinema goes through a constant shift and cycle as tastes change and styles ebb and flow. ![]() However, one film would change what we think of the genre at large, the quite brilliant Matt Damon flick, The Bourne Identity. ![]() The genre has been so widely plagued by mediocrity that it can be easy to sweep all of the epic titles under its umbrella into the gutter. It’s often difficult to find a welcoming audience for rhetoric on the artistic merit of action movies.
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