If You Were Going To Kill Her, Bourne Franchise, The Very Least You Could’ve Done Was Make It Mean Something.
For real, why the hell did you even make this movie?
Nicky Parsons was important to me, and my fury over her untimely death in Jason Bourne goes far and above simple opinion. I feel strongly like some kind of heinous Storytelling Crime was committed, and I can’t let this fall into the silent ocean that is the rest of my day; the injustice done overcomes my usual internet meekness. I’ve got to speak up on behalf of Nicky, who can’t speak up for herself anymore because she’s dead.
Fellow Bourne nerds, join me! Let this aggression against all Storytelling know exactly where and how hard it can shove it.
For those of you who just know her as the blonde who died at the beginning of Jason Bourne, let me hip you:
In the first Bourne film, she is a CIA operative who made copies, put out APBs and tracked police movements while fielding furious phone calls from the divinely militant Chris Cooper. In The Bourne Supremacy (2nd film), Jason recognizes her through his sniper scope, demands a meeting, and interrogates her, trying to gain information blah blah ex-assassin angst. The Bourne Ultimatum (3rd film) is the first and only glimpse into a mysterious past connection between Jason and Nicky; she abandons her post and essentially her entire life to help him track down the people responsible for his brainwashing, and while on the run, they share this little scene in a Euro diner:
Jason: “Why are you helping me?”
Nicky: “It was difficult for me…with you. You really don’t remember anything?”
Jason: “No.”
Nicky’s silent sacrifice for Jason, her grief at whatever passed between them that he couldn’t remember, her unquestioning loyalty and desire to fight with him moved into my young heart and made itself at home, all comfortable-like. I loved what she stood for, I loved that she made her own choices and accepted the consequences, I loved her love of Jason, and I was over the moon when they announced that Nicky would be back in Jason Bourne. Finally, a chance to uncover more of the Bourne mystery and expand the relationship between these two, as Jason and Nicky would inevitably join forces, romantically or not, to fight together for the peace they’ve earned.
However, instead of doing any of the above, the franchise murdered Nicky in the first twenty minutes of Jason Bourne in a giant fire of putrid, acidic, and poorly constructed storytelling.
To my tearful dismay, she was unceremoniously gunned down during a riot in Athens by the CIA, giving her life to keep Jason safe and “furthering the plot” by giving him secret files (from a file conveniently labeled ‘Black Ops’ in a CIA database, because that’s what everyone names their secret mission file folders?) concerning his all-of-a-sudden important father who’d literally never been mentioned before.
The impact her death should have had on Jason and the film was instantaneously swept away by hacky, tacked-on ‘CIA-lied-about-my-dad-what-is-Alicia-Vikander-up-to’ plot stuff that is incredibly goddammed silly at the end of the cinematic day.
In degrees of Storytelling Crime, here is the Bourne Franchise’s first offense: now we’ll never know who Nicky and Jason were to each other before his amnesia. We don’t know what happened, Jason doesn’t know what happened. Only Nicky knows what happened, and now she’s taken the secret to her character grave.
In real life, mysteries like this are acceptable, but this is a movie, moreover, a franchise movie, goddammit. You don’t get to keep secrets like this from the audience. That’s not storytelling, that’s pure laziness or its more terrible first cousin, negligence.
The above only matters to invested humans who saw the first three films and cared, which doesn’t apply to a vast number of people who’ve seen Jason Bourne. To those people, she’s just the blonde woman who seems to know Jason and dies in the beginning. That is also Storytelling Crime: not giving new audiences sufficient time to comprehend her character before killing her is poor plot development. Why not give new people a chance to empathize with her and thusly, make her death scene mean more to wider swath of people? Now, newbies just shrug internally: ‘Who cares?’. Taking a holistic view, the whole movie makes little to no sense for new people: if they don’t know the Bourne movies, what they hell do they care about Jason’s father or whatever? It’s all just so dumb.
Here’s where this film constitutes the Worst Storytelling Crime: I feel cheated.
I feel cheated because I, the audience, invested in Nicky Parsons, in her feelings, in her mysterious relationship with Jason Bourne, in her character, and in her future, and the franchise murdered her without returning any of my investment. They let her bleed out on an Athens sidewalk with a bullet in her brain and Zero Character Closure. I kept waiting for Jason to invoke her name, to mourn, to remember her. We didn’t get a morgue scene, we didn’t get a single second of Jason grieving in any tangible way (I do not count the two lines in that scene with the hacker. That’s not grief, that’s bullshit). Nicky earned and deserved more than Jason’s stony silence and a hacker we’ve never met telling us ‘she knew the risks’. ‘She knew the risks’? That’s all we get? Nicky gives her entire life to Jason and all we get is disdainful resignation? Fuck all of that sideways.
At this point I feel it’s important to clarify: I don’t feel cheated because they killed Nicky and I loved her, I’m heartbroken about that, and heartbroken and cheated are not the same. I’m heartbroken they killed her; I feel cheated because they refused to give her character proper closure when she’d earned it, and to add insult to injury, gave us a boring movie that makes little sense in the Bourne universe and does nothing to further Jason’s development. He revenged himself one last time and met Alicia Vikander, and now ‘maybe’ he’s gonna rejoin the CIA (read: not-so-cleverly reboot the franchise into some computer-y spy thriller series that makes no sense for Jason, as he is a man of action, not typing)? After Nicky gave her life to out their perfidious practices to him and the world? Fucking Awful.
(Again I say, WHY THE HELL DID YOU EVEN MAKE THIS MOVIE.)
The cynical part of me feels that some insidious studio machinations are at work here, callously insisting that at 35, Julia Stiles is ‘too old’ to play opposite Matt Damon (at the tender youthful age of 45, he clearly cannot have romantic vibes with any woman over the hideous age of 30, god i hate hollywood sometimes), and they need to bring in someone young with more attractive box office juice for the 18–34 male demo. They could wrap up all old storylines (Nicky Parsons is perhaps the last of the old Bourne films still standing, if you don’t count Pam Landy, and I don’t, because she was never presented as a romantic possibility); start completely afresh with new characters, new villains, and new romantic ‘tension’ between Bourne and the new-and-fresh-recent-Oscar-winner-being-pushed-by-Hollywood-everywhere Vikander. Young men today may not know Save the Last Dance (young men, see that movie), but they will go see the woman who played the hot, nearly naked android from Ex Machina.
The other cynical part of me heard a whispered internet rumor that Paul Greengrass would only make this film if Universal agreed to finance his other, ‘real’ project. If this and/or the above paragraph is in any way true, everyone involved in killing Nicky (I’m looking at you, Paul Greengrass, Matt Damon, and Universal Pictures) should be goddammed ashamed of themselves.
If you’re going to murder beloved franchise characters, you better make it mean something, you better give them a proper send-off, and most importantly, you better give us a great film (Phil Coulson in The Avengers is a prime example of minor franchise character death done well). You need to set up compelling new characters and tell a story that makes me want another movie. Jason Bourne did none of those things, and for that Most Heinous Storytelling Crime, it should burn for all eternity in the seventh ring of cinematic hell.
Goodbye forever, Bourne Franchise. In your own less-than-immortal words, “You knew the risks”.
