The fourth Jason Bourne film is here: Get up to speed with the Matt Damon spy franchise

The Bourne trilogy, based on the spy books by Robert Ludlum of the same name, brings you an American espionage story like you have never seen before. The trilogy can be best summarised as Ghajini meets James Bond, but with an American super spy. Here’s what you need to know about the famous action movie trilogy before the fourth installment starring Matt Damon as a rogue CIA operative comes out on 5 August 2016:  The Bourne Identity (Bourne Movie #1) The first Bourne movie (2002) was loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s 1980 novel The Bourne Identity. Starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, the movie is about an undercover CIA operative attempting to discover his true identity. Jason Bourne, it turns out, is part of Project Treadstone, a clandestine project within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first installment starts with Matt Damon, who is severely injured, being found floating in the Mediterranean Sea by an Italian fishing crew. Embedded into his hip is a device with the number of a Zurich bank account. After discovering numerous passports, currencies, and a gun in the bank’s deposit box, the man learns that his name is Jason Bourne, and that he lives in Paris. From that moment on, Bourne is tracked by the CIA and narrowly escapes numerous attempts on his life, only to discover that he himself is a skilled CIA assassin who has gone rouge. He teams up with Marie (Franka Potente) as they try and escape trained assassins who will stop at nothing to take his life. The Bourne Supremacy (Bourne Movie #2) The same plot premise, different plot. The film, released in 2004, takes place two years after the first one’s end. Jason Bourne and Marie are hiding in our country of all places, and that too in Goa (that was the defacto choice since Goa is to white people what honey is to bees). A separate CIA operation, in which the CIA is attempting to discover who stole $20 million from them seven years earlier has Bourne framed for the crime. The Russian agent who framed Bourne also tries to kill him, but ends up killing Marie instead. The movie follows Bourne trying to evade the CIA and also track down the Russian agent who killed the love of his life. Look out for: The Rohit Shetty-esque car chase sequence in the end of the movie that is a throwback to our good ol’ Hindi action movies that defy logic. The Bourne Ultimatum (Bourne Movie #3) The third film picks up at the end of the second film, after Bourne escapes from the authorities in Moscow after killing the Russian assassin and goes into hiding. This time Bourne is forced out of hiding by a nosy reporter who was researching a ‘CIA assassin named Jason Bourne’. The two realise they are under surveillance by a group of CIA agents and a remaining Treadstone assassin. Bourne escapes the attempt on his life, though the reporter is not so lucky. Jason Bourne has Rajinikanth’s luck and his skill set. He never dies and always manages to get away from the group of highly trained assassins chasing him. With these powers, Bourne finally faces the person who oversaw his Treadstone training and behavioural modification some years earlier. New memories resurface for Bourne, the people behind Treadstone and Blackbriar are exposed, and Bourne evades another attempt on his life by jumping into a river and surviving. (Rajinikanth’s skill sets, I told you) The Bourne Legacy  The 2012 movie has agent Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner)  an operative belonging to a Defense Department black ops program called Operation Outcome, assigned to Alaska for a training exercise where he stumbles across a government conspiracy that gets him into trouble. Jason Bourne (Bourne Movie #4) It’s 2016, and more than a decade later, Jason Bourne is still trying to figure out who he is. He is still trying to explore his identity and simultaneously run away from CIA operatives who want to kill him. Let’s see how the new movie lives up to the earlier three when it releases on Friday, 5 August!