Dadnology Week 38: Bourne Books vs Movies, Resident Evil Reboots

🧭 The Week That Was — Only One Bourne Movie Has Anything to Do With the Books

If you’ve ever picked up The Bourne Identity assuming the film followed the novel, this is the week that settles it: only the first of five Bourne movies borrows anything real from Robert Ludlum’s books, and even that is loose. We ranked all five against the three novels that started it, added the two Tom Clancy adaptations still missing from the shelf, and gave Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal — both the 1971 original that invented the modern thriller and the 1997 film a court tried to stop — their own verdicts. Reacher season 4 wrapped its most even run yet, handing straight into last week’s Neagley. Away from the page, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot walked into theaters with a 98 percent critics’ score and a plan that has nothing to do with the Alice years — book the babysitter. And if the real question in your house is whether a Mac mini actually earns its keep, two honest answers landed this week: one for running AI models at home, one for a student’s desk.

Jump to: 🍿 Watch This Week · 🎮 Play This Week · 🎬 Movies & TV · 📚 Books & Reading · 🎮 Gaming · 🏠 Smart Home, Camera & Tech

🍿 What to Watch This Week

Top Tip: Toy Story 3 (4/5)

Toy Story 3 — Disney+. Toy Story 5 arrives Wednesday, so this is the week to run the one that takes an unsuspecting father apart in its final ten minutes — and the film any fifth entry has to measure up to.

For the Whole Family: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (4/5)

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — Hulu. Landed at the start of the month and got buried. The back half abandons the theme-park formula for a gothic haunted-house film with a raptor in the hallway — better as a group watch than its reputation suggests.

Once the Kids Are in Bed: MobLand Season 2

MobLand season 2 — Paramount+. Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, ten episodes running weekly through November. Mid-run by now, so three are already banked. If you’re behind on last week’s Reacher finale or Neagley premiere instead, Prime Video’s free trial covers both while MobLand’s next episode banks itself.

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Prime Video (30-Day Free Trial) (opens in a new tab)

Still the fastest way to catch up on last week's Reacher finale and Neagley premiere before MobLand banks its next episode.

The Classic: Aliens

Aliens — Netflix, alongside Alien. Run them a week apart if you haven’t already. Cameron turns Scott’s haunted house into a war film, and somehow neither version makes the other worse.

Also landing this week

• Toy Story 5 — Disney+, Wednesday. The biggest arrival on the list by some distance. We haven’t reviewed it yet, so no verdict from us — but the series hub runs the first four in order first.

Still running

• Ted Lasso season 4 — Apple TV+, new episode Wednesday. Ten episodes, back to the tighter season-one shape. Richmond isn’t the story any more.
• Slow Horses season 6 — Apple TV+, new episode Wednesday. Six episodes adapting Joe Country and Slough House, the books where the series stops circling its own history and walks into it.
• Lanterns — HBO Max, new episode Sunday. A detective story with Green Lanterns in it rather than another origin, finishing 4 October.

Full dates, platforms and the rest of the month are in What to Watch This Week, publishing alongside this roundup.

🎮 What to Play This Week

Top Tip: Dune: Awakening

Dune: Awakening — PS5, Xbox, Tuesday, and day one on Xbox Game Pass — the cheapest way to find out whether the Arrakis survival loop holds you before buying in on PS5.

With the Family: EA Sports FC 27

EA Sports FC 27 — PS5, Xbox, Switch 2, Switch, PC. Friday, for everyone who didn’t pay for the early-access head start. You already know whether this is your household’s Friday night.

From the Backlog: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (5/5)

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — Switch, Switch 2. Thursday’s three big releases are all rated for adults, so this is what goes on instead when the room needs something everyone can take a turn at.

Also releasing this week

• Control Resonant — PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Thursday. Remedy’s sequel to Control, worldwide on the 24th.
• Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Switch 2) — Thursday. Not a launch — the Switch 2 edition of the 2D revival.
• Silent Hill: Townfall — PS5, PC, Thursday. A full-length, self-contained psychological horror set in Scotland, not a remake or a side story.

Full details on every one of these are in What to Play This Week, publishing alongside this roundup.

🎬 Movie & TV News This Week

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot opened in theaters Friday with a 98 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 80 on Metacritic — the highest score any video-game movie has managed on either site. It drops the entire Alice-era mythology and starts over: Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier pulled into one collapsing night, alongside Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser. Critics are calling it funny, genuinely gory, and the most faithful the series has ever been to the survival-horror games it’s based on. Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore and language, and at 95 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome — book the babysitter, this one’s a date-night pick, not a family one.

Bourne: Books vs Movies – Almost Nothing in Common settles an assumption a lot of people carry into the franchise: only the first film borrows anything from Robert Ludlum’s novels, and even that is loose. The other four share a title with the books and invent everything else. Read it before or after any of the five reviews below — it’s the map for everything that follows.

The Bourne Identity (2002) is still the best of the five at 4.5 out of 5 — Doug Liman took a title, an image and one idea from Ludlum and built the film that forced every other spy series to grow up. The 1980 novel it borrows almost nothing from is worth reading anyway, if only to see how little survived the adaptation.

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The Bourne Identity (Paperback) by Robert Ludlum (opens in a new tab)

The 1980 novel the best Bourne film borrows one image and one idea from — and almost nothing else.

The other four don’t reach the same bar. The Bourne Supremacy (3.5/5) kills off Marie in the first ten minutes and shakes the camera until the fights stop making sense — still tense, still a step down. The Bourne Ultimatum (3.5/5) won three Oscars and has the best surveillance sequence the series ever filmed, attached to a hero who can no longer lose. The Bourne Legacy (3.5/5) hands the franchise to Jeremy Renner playing an operative whose abilities come in a pill — better than its reputation for an hour, then it stops. And Jason Bourne (4/5) was written off on release and is better than that: Damon’s return, and the best crowd sequence in the whole series.

Two Tom Clancy adaptations also got the full treatment for the first time. Clear and Present Danger (4/5) is the most politically angry film in the franchise — Washington starts a war it will never admit to, then abandons the soldiers fighting it. The Sum of All Fears (3.5/5) contains one genuinely extraordinary sequence and gets the central character wrong — recasting Ryan as a rookie removed the only thing that made him work. Both now sit on the Tom Clancy hub.

The Jackal (1997) earned a rare 4.5 out of 5 from us despite a 24 percent critics’ score and an actual injunction from Frederick Forsyth over the title — judge it as its own thing, separate from the 1971 novel it barely resembles, and it delivers one of the most watchable thrillers of the nineties.

Reacher season 4 earned a 4.5 out of 5 for its most even run yet — Gone Tomorrow adapted with no dip episode, and Alan Ritchson’s most complete performance as Reacher so far, handing straight over to last week’s Neagley premiere. For an older-school movie night, Commando (1985) still holds up at 4/5, especially if you grew up with it, and The Beekeeper (3.5/5) is classic Statham, done right — a solid, unfussy revenge thriller for when the spy stuff feels too talky.

📚 Books & Reading

The Day of the Jackal earned a full 5 out of 5 — a thriller about an assassination history records as never happening, and it’s still unbearably tense more than fifty years later. Frederick Forsyth’s later work got its due too: The Kill List (4/5) follows a Marine tracker hunting an online preacher radicalising killers from a laptop — late Forsyth, still gripping, just missing the ruthless economy of the early books.

Robert Ludlum’s original Bourne trilogy — the books that started it all, decades before any of the films — all landed a perfect 5 out of 5. The Bourne Identity has the best opening of any thriller on the shelf: fishermen pull a man full of bullets out of the Mediterranean, and he has no memory and a Swiss bank number cut into his skin. The Bourne Supremacy traps an impostor killing under the Bourne name in Hong Kong, and The Bourne Ultimatum brings Carlos the Jackal back for one last hunt. Audible’s free trial covers all three if a screen isn’t the plan tonight.

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Audible Premium Plus (30-Day Free Trial) (opens in a new tab)

Covers Ludlum's original Bourne trilogy and every other book reviewed this week, if a screen isn't the plan tonight.

And The Matarese Circle is the one worth going out of your way for — a rare 5 out of 5 for a premise Ludlum never topped: two career enemies who have each killed someone the other loved are forced to work together, because both their own agencies now want them dead too.

🎮 Gaming News for Dads

It was a quiet week for gaming reveals — no new console news or trailers worth a headline. The actual action landed on the release calendar instead: Dune: Awakening reached PS5 and Xbox Tuesday, and EA Sports FC 27 kicks off the season Friday — both covered in What to Play above, along with the family-safe backlog pick if Thursday’s mature-rated trio isn’t for your house.

🏠 Smart Home, Camera & Tech Round-up

Is a Mac Mini Good for Local LLMs? opens a new run of honest, one-question-at-a-time buyer’s guides, and the local-AI verdict is a genuine yes with one hard limit — the model either fits in your unified memory or it doesn’t, and the guide tells you exactly how much you need before you buy.

Is a Mac Mini Good for Students? is the second answer, and it splits cleanly: for a home study desk it’s the best value in the whole Mac range, but for a student who has to carry the machine to lectures, it’s the wrong one entirely. The current M6 model is the one to buy if you’d rather skip chasing clearance stock on the outgoing generation.

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Apple Mac mini (2026, M6) (opens in a new tab)

The current model, covered in this week's student buyer's guide — 16GB is genuinely enough for a full degree.

The Dadnology Week archive: missed last week? Catch up with Dadnology Week 37.

❓ FAQ

What were the biggest dad-relevant releases in week 38, 2026?

The books-vs-movies question about the Bourne franchise finally got a real answer: only The Bourne Identity (2002) borrows anything from Robert Ludlum’s novels, and even that is loose. We reviewed all five films, all three original novels, The Matarese Circle, two Frederick Forsyth books, both Jackal films, two Tom Clancy adaptations, and Reacher season 4. Away from the shelf, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot opened to a 98 percent critics’ score, and two new guides answered whether a Mac mini is actually worth buying.

What is the best family pick from week 38, 2026?

Toy Story 3 on Disney+ — the right rewatch before Toy Story 5 arrives Wednesday. If gaming is the plan instead, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the pick, since Thursday’s three big game releases are all rated for adults.

Do the Bourne movies actually follow Robert Ludlum's novels?

Only the first one, and even that loosely — the 2002 film keeps the opening image and the premise and invents the rest. The other four films share only a title with Ludlum’s books; the novels are built around Carlos the Jackal, who never appears on screen at all. Bourne: Books vs Movies has the full breakdown.

What did Dadnology publish this week?

Eleven movie and TV reviews (five Bourne films, two Tom Clancy adaptations, both Jackal films, Reacher season 4, Commando and The Beekeeper), six book reviews (Ludlum’s original Bourne trilogy, The Matarese Circle, and two Frederick Forsyth novels), the Bourne: Books vs Movies evergreen, and two Mac mini buyer’s guides. Our What to Watch and What to Play picks for the week ahead publish alongside this roundup.