Three time Oscar winner Oliver Stone’s (Platoon) latest outing, Snowden, is a look at one of the most polarising figures of the 21st century. He is the man responsible for what has been described as the most far-reaching security breach in US intelligence history.
In 2013 Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) quietly leaves his job at the National Security Agency (NSA) and flies to Hong Kong. It is there that he meets with journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), and filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) to reveal US government cyber surveillance programs of epic proportions. A top security contractor with virtuoso programming skills, Snowden has discovered that a virtual mountain of data is being assembled tracking all forms of digital communication. And we’re not just talking about material from foreign governments and terror groups, but from ordinary Americans.
Snowden looks at the forces that turned a conservative young patriot, eager to serve his country, into an historic whistleblower. It poses questions about which liberties we are willing to give up in order for our governments to protect us. The screenplay was written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman), based upon the books The Snowden Files by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena.
Until he made his earthshaking revelations, Edward Snowden was, by all accounts, committed to supporting the US government. After growing up in a family steeped in government service, he enlisted in the military, aiming for the elite Special Forces and combat in the Iraq War. A catastrophic training accident put him out of the running and he turned instead to a career in the CIA, and later the NSA. The picture painted by Stone is of a man driven by his love of country to serve and protect its freedoms. The writers acknowledge they have taken some creative license with events in the story, both for artistic and ethical reasons, but they feel they have stayed true to the spirit of Snowden’s journey. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the man with a determined intensity. He is anything but a playful soul.
Co-writer Fitzgerald puts it this way: “Oliver generally deals in operatic, manly characters. “Ed(ward) is soft-spoken, methodical and quite un-dramatic.” That makes Snowden’s hook-up with his girlfriend all that more perplexing. Based upon what we see here, clearly she was attracted to his mind, rather than his obsessive work ethic and sense of fun. Woodley adds spark and a zest for life in assuming the persona of Mills. Stone readily concedes that writing a movie about a computer programmer is a departure for him. “He’s not an alpha male and that’s different for me. So I made the girl the alpha character.” The relationship between the pair is not only important in the context of the real story, but to give the film some light and shade, away from the array of shadowy types and computer geeks that largely populate it.
I was taken and impressed by the roles Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage took and made their own, the former as a manipulative spook and the latter as a frustrated programmer. There is too much IT-speak built into the script for my liking, although the transition from keen worker to disillusionment is well played out, even if it is overly long. Let’s face it, unlike many spy films, there is not much action that happens here, save for revealing all about US government spying to journos. After all, Snowden and his colleagues sat behind computer screens hacking into whomever the hell they chose to hack into.
And that, of course, is the whole point of the film – they expose the untenable, to say to us that it is not okay for Big Brother to be watching our every move any time it wants. Rated M and also featuring Scott Eastwood (Gran Torino, Fury) and Joely Richardson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Snowden scores a 7 out of 10.
Director: Oliver Stone
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Tom Wilkinson, Melissa Leo, Timothy Olyphant, Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Zachary Quinto, Scott Eastwood, Rhys Ifans
Release Date: 22nd, September 2016
Rating: M
Alex First
David Edwards is the editor of The Blurb and a contributor on film and television