Have you seen any of the Bourne series? If you have not — slight spoiler alert.
In the first movie, The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne is trained to be an automatic assassin. So why does he go on this rampage fighting against his assassin identity to find out who he really is?
If you remember, when Bourne encounters the African dictator he was supposed to off, he unintentionally gazes into the eyes of the man’s young daughter and then snaps out of his focus, and nearly dies as a result.
My hunch about why he is on such a focused mission is that he is searching for his humanity. After years of being an assassin acting on autopilot, he no longer wants to be shut off from his feelings, from living in the world. He goes to great lengths to protect his new love and also to persuade fellow assassins to awaken to the reality of their humanity.
Bourne is clearly the protagonist in the films, but who is the antagonist? It appears to be everyone behind the effort to mold humans into machines with a sole purpose of killing.
So why do we find this series of movies so compelling?
For me, it’s because society wants us to be robots, whereas we want to be humans. And to be a human means to feel. To have emotions. To empathize. To have values. To care.
The title needs slight revision: Jason Bourne = robot human.