As always, even when I don’t quite agree with her on everything, Abigail Nussbaum makes some terrific points:
Which, to my mind, begs the question: what’s so great about realism, anyway? As fiction readers and viewers, we’re not looking for reality–which is generally ugly, incomprehensible, and plotless–but for the illusion of reality. We want a story–which has components that reality doesn’t, such as plot, theme, catharsis and resolution–but we want it to feel real (for various and ever-changing values of ‘real’, depending on the reader and the genre in question). When the pseudo-documentary style started showing up in mainstream entertainment (I think I first encountered it in Firefly and Battlestar Galactica), it caught on because it was visually striking–in the right setting, even ugliness can be beautiful–but mostly because it removed a layer of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. We had all gotten used to handwaving the fact that there were somehow sweeping pans of the Enterprise as it went into warp, and here were shows that suggested an internal story reason for the footage we were watching–a security camera catches the crew of Serenity in the midst of committing a robbery; survivors of the Cylon genocide are filming their escape; a film crew is making a documentary about Dunder-Mifflin. The pseudo-documentary style, in other words, makes the viewing experience easier. When it’s used as Greengrass uses it in The Bourne Ultimatum‘s action scenes, it has just the opposite effect. The audience has to work harder to follow events, and whether or not they succeed, their enjoyment is undercut.
The rest of her thoughts on Bourne, which I too was ultimately disappointed by, are well worth reading.