An Ode to the Music of Jason Bourne (2016)

The most powerful part of Jason Bourne is the one you never noticed.

Credit: IMDb

It was a dark and stormy afternoon. I was reclined on my sofa, rewatching the most recent installment of the Jason Bourne franchise. Then it happened. I started to fall asleep.

But as I slipped between the states of consciousness and unconsciousness, I noticed something. Something I’d never really paid attention to before: the music. In my focus on the fight choreography — and my literal nausea from Paul Greengrass’s infamous shaky cam — I had been completely inattentive to the sound of Jason Bourne.

Try, for a moment, to play the Bourne theme in your head.

Not the Moby song that plays over the end credits (“Extreme Ways” — a classic), but the instrumental score by John Powell and David Buckley that underpins the 2016 film.

Can you hear it?

Unless you’re a Jason Bourne megafan, I’m guessing you probably can’t.

It’s not like other orchestral themes (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Mission Impossible) that live rent-free in our collective memory. I’m not saying Powell and Buckley’s music isn’t great (it is: Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon score is legendary, and Buckley’s worked on The Good Fight and The Sandman). It’s just that, as a casual Bourne viewer, the music never stood out to me before.

And yet, it’s everywhere.

If I could visualize Jason Bourne (2016) as audio layers, there’d be dialogue, then sound effects, and beneath that, a near-constant bed of music. Sometimes its loud and intense, and at other times, it’s just a few string notes. The music is there during car crashes, closed-door meetings, character confrontations. The score hums underneath almost every scene — so much so that when it stops, the silence feels startling.

We all know that music is integral to cinema. It elicits emotion, builds tension, and heightens impact. It’s easy to recognize its importance in films like Interstellar, Harry Potter, or Indiana Jones. The type of film scores we celebrate often demand attention. Think of the title scroll for (almost) every Star Wars movie, and the intensity of the theme song. These are music scores that play so loudly that in cinemas they often make me jump (or give me chills — yes, I’m that person). But maybe the best scores are the ones that vanish completely — the kind that shape emotion without ever drawing attention. Rewatching Jason Bourne made me appreciate the power of music that doesn’t want to be noticed, but still does just as much emotional work as any other theme.

Jason Bourne’s score manipulates you in quiet ways. It doesn’t swell; it thrums. It keeps your pulse elevated, even in scenes where nothing intense is actually occurring. “Watching” the movie with my eyes closed, I still felt the action just as intensely as actually viewing the screen. If anything, the experience was made all the more intense because I was acutely focused on the sonic dimensions. For the sake of experimentation, I also watched part of the movie on mute. Without any audio, the shaky cam is even more painfully obvious, and the world dissolves into a flat screen. The music and the sound effects fill in the gap between the screen and the audience, making the movie come alive.

Maybe that’s the genius of the Jason Bourne score — it disappears so completely into the movie that it becomes part of Bourne himself: unseen, efficient, and, when finally noticed, ultimately unforgettable.

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