He only learns his name is supposedly “Jason Bourne” after he follows up on a Swiss bank account number encoded into a laser thingy that was surgically implanted into his hip. He can read, write and speak a babel of tongues, instinctively assess threats, and punch out Zurich police and field strip their stupid little guns without thinking, but he otherwise has no clue about his past life. Jason Bourne (Damon) has near-total amnesia. It’s a bit on the nose that a movie about a guy named “Bourne” begins with our protagonist pulled from water, awakening as a completely blank slate. It is a movie with practical effects, roaring car engines, breaking glass, bloody fistfights and one good gratuitous explosion. There are surely visual effects or green screens somewhere in it, but if there are, you are generally unable to tell where.

It’s the kind of film that big studios have basically stopped making anymore in favor of superhero films. The Bourne Identity, which turns 20 this year just a little bit after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (which the United States spent trillions of dollars to definitively lose), is a fascinating watch today for several reasons aside from marveling at how little Matt Damon has aged. They had endless, manic zest for that kind of thing, and no credit limit on making it happen. The ineptitude and laziness that led up to it, the furious scramble to put in place a useless security apparatus after it, the senseless choices to invade foreign countries when what was really necessary to bring the perpetrators to justice was already in place, all illustrated very clearly that the grown-ups just did not know what they were doing unless what they were doing was bad and wrong. For those of us of draft age in 2001, though, 9/11 was really the moment of epiphany. The kids dragging themselves to school while their classmates and teachers die on ventilators have recently come to learn this sobering fact. Worse is when you discover that the adults in the room are evil, and are in fact disdainful of the concept of good. There’s a moment in every kid’s life when they discover that the adults in the room are just as clueless as anybody else.

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