Hacker Cinema
The Bourne Identity
2002 · Film · 119 min
Part of The Bourne Collection
Directed by Doug Liman
Wounded to the brink of death and suffering from amnesia, Jason Bourne is rescued at sea by a fisherman. With nothing to go on but a Swiss bank account number, he starts to reconstruct his life, but finds that many people he encounters want him dead. However, Bourne realizes that he has the combat and mental skills of a world-class spy—but who does he work for?
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25 comments on Hacker News
I guess it's a sign of getting old when I see the world classic and expect Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, but instead the list has Arrival, The Martian, and the Bourne Identity. The Sixth Sense is on the list for the US and it's a movie I coincidentally rewatched last night, again finding it to be a masterpiece.
In any case, very different list in Canada: Rocketman, Ford v Ferrari, Little Miss Sunshine, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park, and the Proposal.
Excellent movie. Worth noting that it was written by Tony Gilroy, who created Andor and cowrote The Bourne Identity, so if you enjoyed those you're likely to enjoy this.
Mostly, I will watch a movie a second or third time if I am tired and it's on TV and cannot sleep. So there is only a small intersection of films that I have watched multiple times and would admit to watching even once.
So excluding those, from most to least (probably).
- elf
- the Bourne identity
- groundhog day
- ronin
- Willie Wonka (the original)
- the fifth element
- ghost dog (any Jim Jarmusch)
- the blues brothers
- singin' in the rain
- crouching tiger, hidden dragon
- my friend totoro
I am probably leaving out quite a few, but all these films I have seen enough times to reconstruct in my head, scene by scene.
> at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere.
I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.
The problem I have with hardware based authentication, such as Yubikey is that it's a physical thing that can be taken away from you (or just break, or get lost), which makes me nervous.
Maybe it's stupid, but the scenario I always have in mind is one from "Bourne Identity" movie, with Jason Bourne found in the sea, with nothing on him, no wallet, no phone. And it's not far fetched scenario either: I travel a lot, internationally, so I always imagine being mugged, having my phone and wallet taken away from me. Being able to login to my accounts, and more importantly, access my money in the bank with nothing but a password stored in my brain is important to me.
Ironically, the Greenglass-directed Bourne films that the quotes refer to are more like Bond than the very first Bourne film (The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman). In that film, Bourne travels by boat to Marseilles, by train to Zurich, and then by impulsively-hired-car-driven-by-sketchy-woman to Paris. (And then by stolen car to someplace in rural France.)
In the second Bourne film (the first one directed by Greenglass), he starts off in Goa, then shows up in an airport in Italy, and later appears (with no indication of how he travels) in Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and New York City.
And, honestly, there wasn't a whole lot of visible "travel" in the "old" Bond, either. Bond is an agent of MI6, often with a cover as some kind of rich businessman or playboy. So of course he travels everywhere by passenger plane. (Unless he's doing some covert infiltration by parachute or surfboard or whatever.) The difference between Bond and (later) Bourne in terms of travel is that Bond has the resources of a wealthy government, while Bourne has... some kind of ninja superpower, I guess. In both cases, they mostly just translate invisibly from place to place.
I experienced this with skiing, where [1] you need to look down the hill and lean forward amongst other things for best results, things your fear reflexes want to avoid at all costs at first.
But with the parkour on top of city buildings that is more extreme than what they portray on rooftop chases in a Bourne Identity movie... hmm... I think that is another level. There is a good chance you will die if you do that alot over 10 years. It probably requires some letting go of ego to the point where you are happy to die early. Like the free and solo climbers.
[1] Forgive me if you are a great skiier this is my dumb interpretation!
The Bourne Identity, Skyfall, Game of Thrones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.
It does not have to be original. And I don't mean only the intro but the entire soundtrack. Often, the theme song is reused over and over during the film with many variations to set the tone of a scene.
Bad movies skimp on soundtracks.
A note here: The Bourne Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum are based in books (which have a better, richer and kinda different story when compared to the movies ).
I would reccomend having a look at them.
> it does spread the idea that the CIA is incredibly capable
That’s hardly in dispute, is it?
> and individuals can sway overall policy
Certainly not the impression I got from at least the first three films. The Bourne Identity ends in an unceremonious coverup of a failed operation, and the sole “idealist” character in the next two films torches her career as well to go to the press. Which depending on your view could be considered exactly what Snowden did, for better or for worse.
Certainly typical tropey US spy movie fare (American characters playing CIA assassination games in Europe, etc.), but more revisionist Western than John Wayne.
This is an incredibly minor point, but that long list of words didn't make sense initially. I hit the word 'Borne', figured it had something to do with the 'The Bourne Identity' movies, and then couldn't figured if it was real or not :)
For other people that haven't seen this acronym before:
1. the article is about putting explosives into giant trucks, to blow people up with
2. the list of words reads a easier with a hyphen between Vehicle and Borne.
Essentially, it reads like this:
(Suicide)(Vehicle-Borne)(Improvised Explosive)Device
It's funny how much the world has changed in such a short time.
A few nights ago I was watching the 2002 film The Bourne Identity. There's a line where one of the characters is horrified that the government knows she's traveling with someone else. "How can they know we're together?!" she shrieks.
Today you just ask Google or Facebook, and it will tell you who's together, where, and for how long. And with a straight face they tell you it's a feature, not a bug.
> Like the GPS trackers, license plates are devices designed to aid in identifying and locating a vehicle from a distance by technological means.
License plates originated in the early 1900s, long before color film cameras were a thing, and more than a century before inexpensive, at-scale license plate readers were a thing.
License plates were devices designed to aid police officers in identifying a vehicle from up close by requesting a license plate check.
It was remarkable in 2002's Bourne Identity when the highly-trained agent remarked that he knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle in the lot, and the implication that he'd recall them if they happened across the same cars again was scary.
The fact that it costs almost nothing to outfit every meter reader with a license plate scanner and log the motion of people and cars in a central database is an accident caused by the progress of technology, not a design goal of the license plate.
Preventing abuse of technologies as they become possible is a hard problem.
For 5-6 hour flights, it's usually a combination of things for me:
- Videos related to whatever technology will be pertinent at the meeting I'm flying in for.
- Distraction movies: Bourne Identity, etc.
- Anime I'm currently binge-watching.
- Games on my phone.
- Printed technical articles I've been procrastinating about reading.
Honestly, how virtuous/edifying my in-flight activities are depends on how much sleep I got the night before. This is one reason I dislike early-morning flights - they leav me zonked and unable to make good use of my in-flight solitude.
Side note: On Android, I just discovered "Movies Anywhere". It was a great tool for downloading DRM's movies/shows for my last trip.
You mean like State sponsored hacking? Sure... I don't know I would say that it's something else entirely.
The core mindset still comes from the same place. Understanding everything. Understanding the implications of bugs and features of known systems, using that for grand exploitation to achieve things they weren't designed for.
What inspired them to start hacking in the first place may or may not have come from a place of not having everything. Perhaps their trigger of interest were movies or TV shows: War Games, Hackers... or James Bond or the nerdy guy from NCIS, 24, Bourne Identity, MI5 or countless other TV shows and movies where hacking is glamorized.
The start of that career path is the same, regardless of what brought you there - a need to understand your tools, deeply.
First the spy/action movies are epitomized by the Bond series, and Kingsman has little to do with Bond. Sure it has gadgets, a megalomaniacal villain with a world destroying plan, and British agents. But Bond isn't a street urchin, never has a family, let alone family problems, never goes thru a recruitment or training process, rarely ever works on a team, and is entirely a governmental employee.
And it's even farther away from Mission Impossible, and the Bourne Identity series. So it can only be a parody of Bond, and not only is it far from Bond, it's not even funny. How can you parody something without being funny? It really smells like they had an idea that was more serious, then realized they couldn't make it work midway through, and pivoted to a not very funny parody.
I'd be shocked if they'd all managed to embed agents in all of them. Intelligence agencies aren't all staffed only by super-competent elite agents as portrayed in films like the Bourne Identity.
Having said that, we do know for a fact that some US companies and research establishments have actually been penetrated by Chinese agents because some of them have been caught. The problem with taking advantage of such agents though is that they not only have to get a job, they also have to get access to whatever the agency is targeting. In a company like Apple with extremely tight internal security that could be pretty challenging.
What movie did you get that from? It sounds really cool. Like a cross between Goodfellas and the Bourne Identity.
Many people will have watched this movie, taken it as an action thriller set in a world that while hinted at wasn't expected to be real. It's quite an eye opener in hindsight that this is indeed real... Bourne Identity, another one that seems too far fetched to have any truth to it... given what's come to light in the last 5 years, truth and fantasy/fiction in this arena has become blurred enough to be scary.
It was #2 for the year and wildly profitable. So, no I am not doubting there where plenty of people who loved the movie. The movie was above average and that's the problem. Hollywood depends on movies like The Sorcerer's Stone, The Fellowship of the Ring, A New Hope, Bourne Identity, even Iron Man to drive future revenue.
Movies that build off of that success make money, but they don't prime the pump.
The book is from 1980 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Identity_(novel)), and there was a film in 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bourne_Identity_(1988_film)
Are you sure it wasn't that one?
>>There was a 70s movie... Are you talking about the Bourne Identity TV movie from the 80s? He washed up on shore and there was microfilm with the swiss account number in his leg or something
Funny. The German in the Bourne Identity UIs is full of errors and fake words. Then again, it is still a lot better than the "German" spoken by Nazis in Hollywood movies.
It makes me laugh, all these movies like Bourne Identity or the James Bond franchise or TV shows like X-files or Spooks where governments and intelligence agencies are made out to be a powerful and capable (if sometimes malevolent) entity. The reality is that any (Western) intelligence agency couldn't spy their way out of a wet paper bag.
And this is hardly the first highly public breach... MI6 staffers are notorious for leaving unencrypted laptops on trains or in taxis. But as an ordinary UK citizen, under the New Liebour government, I'm relieved that they're so completely incompetent.
That logic may be true about bikes.
But what if my Facebook profile says I like the movies Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and The Bourne Identity? It's very easy to extrapolate a common movie "typeness" that someone likes from a list. Then you can target new movies in that genre very specifically to users who would be most likely to watch them.
For movies, books, tv shows, etc, and repeatable purchases, the cache of information at Facebook is far, far more valuable than two words at Google.