You could also say that The Bourne Identity is just a twist on The Manchurian Candidate. Again, a highly-trained assassin, brainwashed to believe they're a normal person, until they're triggered to complete their mission.

Your post made me revisit the idea, posited by many including Kurt Vonnegut, that there are only a handful of plot elements out there. We take them, remix them, and then spew them out with modern contrivances. If we do it well, we get something like the aforementioned movies. If not, we get a Steven Seagal flick.

I doubt the creators of Bourne were as interested in Total Recall as they were in mixing James Bond, The Manchurian Candidate, and a little John Woo.

@AlienFanatic said:

Your post made me revisit the idea, posited by many including Kurt Vonnegut, that there are only a handful of plot elements out there. We take them, remix them, and then spew them out with modern contrivances. If we do it well, we get something like the aforementioned movies. If not, we get a Steven Seagal flick.

I saw somebody say something like this on TV once... he said there are only so few storylines for us to work with, and what makes movies interesting and different are the behaviors of the characters involved.

There's a scene in Sunset Boulevard where the protagonist, Joe Gillis, a struggling writer, is in an office having his script returned to him. The secretary [Edit] a character named Betty Shaefer, hands it over to him, saying "So, you take Plot 27-1, make it glossy, make it slick..." (found it in a copy of the script, posted here) in order to meet technical requirements to be a sellable project. The line suggests there are only so many story lines that Hollywood producers are willing to risk their money to produce, hence the relatively narrow stream of stories coming down the pipe.

Here's a particularly fitting example. Sharon Stone plays a woman, haunted by the memory of seeing her parents killed, seeks to avenge the murder of her parents by killing their murderers with the help of a mysterious stranger who comes into town and has a dubious connection to the main antagonist - this was the basic plot for two movies she did: The Specialist (1994) and The Quick and the Dead (1995)

I remember a piece of a stand-up bit (the comedian's name escapes me, I heard it while falling asleep one night while listening to a radio show called "The Sunday Night Funnies on CHUM FM") who observed how movie trailers sound the same. "One man. His way. (And there's always a girl). The girl."....

Back in high school, our English Lit. teacher told us there are basically three general story foundations - "man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself".

It seems there are only so many possible storylines out there. So, credit to any writer/director who can tell a story in a fresh, compelling way.