I am reading Bourne Identity, almost a couple of years after watching the movie. And it leaves me hugely angry at the movie adaptation, what I'd only call as a gross injustice to the brilliant and gripping spy novel by Robert Ludlum.The movie is, in itself, quite thrilling from the beginning to the end. But when you look at it as an adaptaion of the great Ludlum novel, it leaves one baffled if not frustrated. There's the protagonist in the movie Jason Bourne, but without the antagonist Carlos, whose name in the novel surfaces almost as many times as does Bourne's. Another thing. Marie, whom Jason takes hostage in his quest to run and saves from an attempted rape and murder(followed by the hostage-kidnapper romance paradigm,) is replaced by Marie, a needy girl whom Bourne pays 20k to help him escape. Halfway into the novel, I was beginning to get the feeling that barring the opening scene in the movie, no other scene is as it is in the novel. Pretty frustrating!
However, I feel for those involved in the adaptation. What is in print, cannot always be translated into reel. The picture that we develop through imagination can almost never be perfected, and hence cannot be captured in a film. Perhaps what they have tried to dish out in the movie is the core that makes the novel so wonderful. And it is with this crux, Bourne Identity translates into one of the most entertaining spy thrillers I have seen, albeit not the same thrill that came reading the novel.
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