The Bourne Identity
October 2007 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: HD DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Bourne, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) awakes on an Italian trawler shaken, stirred, and shot-up. He has no memory of who he is, where he has been, or what he has done. He discovers combat, survival, and linguistic skills far beyond normal. After an intense chase across Europe, he learns he is "US government property, a malfunctioning $30 million dollar [covert] weapon." Based on the first of Robert Ludlum’s popular Bourne novels, the screen adaptation captures the best elements of the novel in an edgy cinematic storytelling style. Much more grounded in reality than Bond films, The Bourne Identity provides a riveting two hours of spy-versus-spy action that has great appeal for fans of the genre.

The image quality on the recently released HD DVD runs the gamut from very sharp film, to handheld HD video quality, to soft-looking stock footage (US Congress from the air), to grainy low-light scenes where film (or digital video) "speed" is required to capture images with little available light, leading to inevitable grain in the images. Each type of image fits the onscreen mood, action, and feel very well. Overall, the HD DVD images are very good, but not reference quality. The improvement over the DVD is substantial. Throughout the film there are intentional color shifts: slightly blue or blue-green outside reflecting the constantly overcast skies present in every scene. Interior scenes have a shift to green. The color shifts give the film a harsh, iron-fisted feel that reflects Bourne’s hard-as-steel persona when he is in master-spy mode. Other than occasional single-frame dust specks or water-spots that are virtually invisible unless you use stop-frame mode, I saw no artifacts in this transfer.

The Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack has lots of impact and detail, though it lacks a bit of transparency and you-are-there detail of uncompressed or lossless soundtracks. Nevertheless, this soundtrack is a worthwhile improvement over that of the DVD. Foley and effects work is quite good, with each firearm having a distinctly different sound. When the firearm is the type that ejects shells, you hear the shells hit the ground with distinctly different sounds for each type of gun. Detail at that level exists throughout the movie. Acoustic spaces are rendered very convincingly, though the beat-up Mini is surprisingly quiet inside for a car in that condition -- an expedient to make the dialogue in the car more of a focal point.

Doug Limon provides an interesting nuts-and-bolts director commentary. Universal’s U-Control feature allows you to turn on either picture-in-picture commentary from the director and/or actors, or you can turn on a complex data profile that looks like something you might expect to see in a high-end spy database. The extras are all standard definition: four features covering Robert Ludlum, how he came to write the Bourne novels, and his process; an alternate opening and ending; deleted scenes and an extended scene; a making-of featurette; a screenwriter interview; a discussion of the relationship between Bourne and Marie through the first two Bourne movies; an amnesia analysis; a covert-ops agent commenting on the realism of the movie; a feature on vehicle chase-scene sound effects with interactivity; fight-scene analysis; a Moby music video; and a trailer. While a few of the extras are toss-aways, many are quite interesting and enhance enjoyment of the film.

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