The Jason Bourne trilogy ended with the CIA’s crimes exposed, but the franchise's eponymous hero had no clear path forward for the future. While Jason Bourne has much in common with other movie spies, in some respects, the amnesiac assassin is very much alone. Where James Bond had his consistent colleagues in the MI6 to rely on, Bourne couldn’t trust anyone and gradually learned, throughout the original trilogy, that his former employers were trying to kill him. Even after Bourne eventually exposed the CIA’s crimes in The Bourne Ultimatum’s ending, he was left with nowhere to go.
However, while the Bourne movies and the Bond movies have their differences, one thing that the two super-spies do have in common is an uncanny ability to land on their feet. In 2016’s belated sequel Jason Bourne, it is revealed that Bourne is still alive and (relatively) well after the events of the original trilogy. Even though the former assassin revealed the CIA’s secret assassination program Treadstone and its follow-up Blackbriar, he survived to tell the tale in Jason Bourne. How he escaped the CIA isn’t clear, but how he has earned his keep is very much in character.
Jason Bourne Has Been Working As A Street Fighter
Jason Bourne is set 12 years after the original trilogy. Unfortunately, the sequel never thoroughly explains what Bourne has been doing for this entire period, but what is known is that he has now recovered his memories. Thanks to Jason Bourne’s martial arts skills, he can eke out an existence as a street fighter, and Jason Bourne implies that this has been Jason's new occupation for some time, judging by his reputation. This is considerably different from the source novels, which have a much more detailed story for the character and don't include the street fighting stint.
The Movie's Jason Bourne Story Is Different To The Books
In 2004's The Bourne Legacy, the first Bourne novel set after the events of The Bourne Ultimatum, the titular assassin follows a very different calling from his movie counterpart. Free from the need to evade the CIA, Bourne has returned to living under his birth name, David Webb. As David Webb, he has become a professor of Linguistics at Georgetown. If this idyllic suburban life sounds too comfortable for Jason Bourne, that is because it is, and Bourne soon finds himself drawn back into international intrigue when a bullet barely misses his head.
While these two versions of the spy’s fate differ greatly, so do the literary and cinematic versions of Jason Bourne’s origin. Despite these differences, however, both the Bourne novels and their movie adaptations offer timely, sharp criticisms of the CIA’s overreach. Whether Bourne becomes a linguistics professor by temporarily retiring his killer persona or a successful street fighter by honing the skills his old employment provided him, the antihero always ends up pulled back into espionage. There is no escaping the tendrils of the security state for Jason Bourne, as evidenced by his various fates after the original trilogy.