https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1389405692885352448

Putting aside that Jason Bourne is fictional, this false display of manliness reminds me of how my dad always said he couldn't take the Bourne movies seriously because Matt Damon looks like an honour roll student.

Also, the CIA was never scary because the individual agents are badasses, the individual agents have always been Ivy league educated preppy rich kids, who weren't the ones that would inherit their parents' companies. Like the CIA is scary for its institutional power, not because all the guys played rugby at Princeton for one semester. As dumb as that ad was, that Latina woman could probably take on most CIA employees from the 1970s in a fight. Like guaranteed most CIA employees have never physically overpowered a person they didn't drug.

  • Deadend [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Wasn’t Bourne an enemy of the CIA that tortured and brain washed him?

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yes, also I love the Bourne movies but they make me sad because they're maybe the end of an era where it was okay to show open disdain for the CIA in movies and TV. I'm pretty sure they get portrayed as neutral or a force for good when they appear in media nowadays. I mean I know that skepticism of the CIA and other US government agencies in the 90s and early 2000s was more the internalization of neoliberalism, and belief that inherently government doing stuff is bad, but openly worshipping the military feels so much worse.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        they’re maybe the end of an era where it was okay to show open disdain for the CIA in movies and TV.

        Hardly the end of an era. Subversive cinema pops up all the time in B-movie releases. It only becomes a problem in the big A-list features that start tapping CIA cut-outs for money.

      • sam5673 [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        That's because after you watched them you were inducted into a government program, trained to be the ultimate killer and had all your old memories wiped

      • Deadend [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I remember being surprised the one girl died because it was so out of nowhere.

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          It was in the opening scene of the second movie, lol. The death was very "she's inconvenient to the plot, better kill her off ASAP".

          • Deadend [he/him]
            ·
            4 years ago

            I thought she was going to come back as that death was so bullshit and abrupt!

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I thought it was the State Department, or was that just in the books/am I conflating him with a different book from the same author?

      All I clearly remember from the books is that he was a polyglot academic who joined a US military death squad in Vietnam after his Vietnamese family was slaughtered by an unidentified plane (implied to be American), and then somehow wound up as a test subject for US intelligence mind control or some shit until they confused him with someone else from the death squad and tried to kill him, only for them to get a redemption arc in the end and become his handlers again?

      In retrospect it's not a very coherent or morally consistent plot, but considering it came from the same author that wrote "wot if a US congressman did blackface to defuse the Iran Embassy Hostage Crisis?" and "wot if China did a false flag on Hong Kong to justify invading Taiwan somehow?" (that was another Jason Bourne book), that's not very surprising.