He finds out he was transformed into an expert hitman by a black ops programme called Operation Treadstone, which was eventually upgraded into Operation Blackbriar. Renner is on the run when intelligence chief played by Edward Norton orders that the project has to be shut down and every single agent will be wiped out. The story begins in East Berlin in the beginning of the s with an early Treadstone patient — an American soldier, played by Jeremy Irvine, who is brainwashed and ready to kill — has been captured by Soviets.
Bentley manages to run away but instead returns to an agency that mistrusts and mistreats him. The series then fast-forwards to the present day and focuses on the stories of other assassins in different locations including North Korea, Paris, and Russia and include an oil rigger played by Biran J Smith and piano tutor Han Hyo-joo and jumps back and forth from present day to the s.
In writing the novels, Ludlum majorly depended on his overactive imagination and perhaps even wild conspiracy theories to write spy fiction. In the early 70s, Americans were shocked to find out that the CIA had been working on a program that used them as the guinea pigs, and it was all about mind control, no less.
Project MKUltra, which had been in operation since the early 50s, was brought to light and it was revealed that the secret service was working on something that would not only allow them to break down enemy agents but also help them exercise control over their own.
And it looks likes CIA was not the only one to have tried such a thing. Soviets, Chinese, and even North Koreans had been meddling in this science for quite some time.
There was a branch of MKUltra, called Project Midnight Climax, in which CIA had prostitutes on its payroll to bring in people who would then be dosed with LSD, given electroshocks and put through sensory deprivation, among other things.
After some time, the agency started dosing people in restaurants, bars and beaches! Not just Americans, but Canadians also fell victim to this.
Before all of this, they even had detention camps in Europe and East Asian countries, where they tried out these methods on captured agents. In , the projects were scrapped, and many documents related to them were destroyed before they could be properly investigated. Whatever remained have been slowly declassified, over time.
In December , a new document came to light. Later, after Bourne also exposed Blackbriar, the CIA attempted to reframe the program in congressional hearings as an operation designed specifically to hunt down Bourne himself. But that was just a cover-up. Makes sense, right? Not really -- the Bourne mythology is notoriously convoluted -- but it doesn't have to all click together. That's how conspiracies work. As fun as it can be to tease out the specifics of the Bourne world, the Treadstone material is not what most people enjoy about the Bourne movies.
You remember them for Paul Greengrass's constantly shaking camera work, Tony Gilroy's surprisingly clever spycraft dialogue, and scenes where Bourne blows up a building by sticking a magazine in a toaster.
The Treadstone backstory is fun, packed with espionage jargon and plenty of deception, but it mostly exists to give the Bourne character a larger force to fight against and a dark history to atone for. Treadstone was never the point. In the same way, USA's Treadstone could conceivably be enjoyed without an advanced degree in Bourne studies. There are plenty of tense action sequences, plot twists, and scenes where guys say stuff like, "We need to contain this.
The problem is that the show, at least in the first four episodes that were made available for review, lacks a Bourne-like center to guide you through the chaos. Creator Tim Kring, who helmed the similarly complicated serialized ensemble show Heroes , clearly knows his Bourne history.
All the pieces, including some brutal fight scenes with unconventional weapons, are there. Treadstone simply can't remember how to put them together. Skip to main content Entertainment.
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