Hundreds — if not thousands — of secret government and quasi-government programs funded by millions and millions of dollars with little oversight, all designed to build better weapons and better soldiers.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which performs research for the U.S. Department of Defense, is just one organization developing the kinds of programs that would fit perfectly into Bourne’s world:
Not just high-tech weapons and robotic prostheses, but advances in neuroscience to help reduce battlefield stress, hasten learning, improve analytic capabilities and even engender trust.
Bioethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Moreno explores the relationship between brain research and national defense in his book “Mind Wars.”
“The improvement of soldiers’ war-fighting ability, brain-machine interfaces and the use of drugs and other measures to confuse and disrupt the enemy are the sorts of approaches that are going to be developed over the next decades, driven by cutting-edge science,” he writes.
Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, a super agent who has benefited from the government’s top-secret medical research; Rachel Weisz is the doctor who helped develop the science and Edward Norton acts as the kingpin, a sort of corporate-military-intelligence hybrid, who tries to control it all.
Gilroy: I wanted to keep everything really kitchen sink-y and crude and authentic and real and did not want to have it feel science-fiction, and I knew that what we were talking about is really on the way here or certainly a lot of people have it up on the chalkboard. …
