Bond vs Bourne

[layne67]

I saw 'Casino Royale' last Saturday. It was the first time ever that I watched a Bond movie on the big screen. With the exception of the last three with Pierce Brosnan as 007, I've never watched them anywhere. I do know that there had been four Bonds - Connery, Dalton, Moore and Brosnan ( or were there more? ) - and I have a certain fondness for Brosnan which ran from his Remington Steele days. And Michelle Yeoh certainly kicked ass in one, and Sean Bean was delicious of course but I was never really into James Bond per se. He's just not my kind of hero with all his impossiblly high-tech gadgets ( invisible cars anyone? ) and why oh why didn't the villains just shoot the hero and be done with it instead of going through all those long drawn-out slow methods of killing?

But I wanted to watch 'Casino Royale'. And I was really looking forward to it, too. Maybe because Daniel Craig doesn't look one bit like the usual Bond and also because they say that he is the best Bond ever and the film is not really like the typical Bond movies. Heh, we have men-journalists rhapsodizing about Craig here and almost every review that I read gave it an 'A'. Not to mention i_o_r_h_a_e_l who's head-over-heels in love with Craig *g* So, yeah, I went, I watched, and surprise, surprise, I loved it!

However, watching it, I couldn't help comparing it with the Bourne movies. I've actually compared Bourne to Bond ( hey, they even have the same initials! ) when 'Bourne Identity' first came out a few years back. And whilst the earlier Bond movies always seemed to rub me off in the wrong way, Jason Bourne, played by my darling Matt Damon, had me hooked right from the moment Bourne was err, hooked out from the sea, unconscious and waking up an amnesiac, eerily silent most of the time but with lethal moves and equally lethal, quick-thinking mind. And there wasn't a single gadget in sight! Oh yes, that was when I first fall in love with Matt Damon. In fact until now I'm not quite sure whether it's Matt Damon or the character Bourne that I fall for. So each time I watch Brosnan as Bond, I was like, Bourne would never do that or Bourne would never say that. And the martini? Heh, the only alcohol that Bourne used was the one that he washed his gunshot wound with.

There are times when I can't help wondering that when Ludlum wrote his Bourne trilogy he was attempting to create an anti-thesis to Fleming's Bond.

Until Daniel Craig comes along. My husband keeps teasing me that Bourne has now met his match. Uh huh. Sure this Bond is tough, smart and sexy as hell and I like him best compared to the previous Bonds and yes, I'm looking forward to watching more Bond movies with Craig at the helm. But at the end of the day, Jason Bourne still has my heart!

For one thing, there are no 'Bourne-girls' with smouldering eyes and sexy European accents to be jealous of. I like Marie well enough ( I think Franka Potente was great as Marie ) and she didn't die in the books but I certainly did not mourn her early demise in 'Bourne Supremacy'!

Speaking of Bond-girls, I thought that the girl who played Vesper looks very familiar but I couldn't for the life of me place where I've seen her before. It's only today that I read in the papers that she played Sybilla in 'Kingdom of Heaven'. Verper is gorgeous indeed but I don't think I would have like it one bit if Bourne falls in love with her.

Oh, another thing. The action sequence in 'Casino Royale' is fantastic. Almost as good as Bourne's. And that run when both of them ran like the Terminator? The Dogget-run, my husband calls it. Awesome.

I wonder. If it's a Bourne movie playing alongside 'Happy Feet', would it be trampled to second place the way Bond is? Or more to the point, if Bond and Bourne are shown at the same time, who would win?

Comments

[i-o-r-h-a-e-l.livejournal.com]

Yes! :D