Open Road Pictures
I’m not much for conspiracy theories, so I’ve been turned off of Oliver Stone since JFK, but I haven’t really seen much from him anyway. He clearly has an anti-government bent, but Snowden is a weird place to go. It makes sense from him, but Edward Snowden is a complicated person. He’s been called a traitor and a hero and much in between. I don’t know what I think, but I really wanted to approach this movie from a more unbiased perspective.
Snowden comes from Oliver Stone and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the titular role. The movie uses the classic conceit of a wrap-around to tell the story. The narration comes from when Snowden met with journalists in 2013 in a Hong Kong hotel to leak his story. This is partially effective, but I actually wanted to see more of that. It had a tension and realness to it, less artifice and lionizing.
In 2004, Snowden enlisted in the military, but after a series of leg accidents, he was discharged. I should clarify that this is what the movie states about him, not anything official. Soon after in DC, he met who would become his longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). He applied for and received a job at the CIA despite having no undergraduate degree.
The movie then shows his training montage, with some interesting scenes that are very dramatized. Snowden is far ahead of everyone else in his hacking training, impressing his instructor Corbin O’Brien (Rhys Ifans, creepy but can’t retain a consistent American accent) and a surprisingly good Nicolas Cage as former security guru Hank Forrester. Hank plants the seeds that there may be problems with the government’s surveillance program, which will come up soon.
After that, it’s about watching Snowden and his drama with his girlfriend and his slow approach towards his leak. The movie takes a firm stance and paints his struggle as morally righteous, symbolized by light and darkness in obvious ways. Until the very end of the movie, I was mostly enjoying it, even if the argument scenes with his girlfriend weren’t particularly interesting.
But it went over the line in lionizing Snowden — that said, the movie was trying to do that. I think it won’t convince people hard against him either way. There was a moment at the end that worked a bit too well in comparison to the rest of the movie; I thought it made the rest seem silly and melodramatic in comparison.
I liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt a lot, and he did a pretty good take on the real life Snowden. His voice isn’t dead on but you may be fooled while you watch him. Shailene Woodley is pretty good too, with a complexity I haven’t seen since her earlier work. Rhys Ifans is good at playing weird creepy, lending a few scenes with him a lot of tension.
There’s an interesting story here that’s overly dramatized, and I am more positive than negative. But Oliver Stone made a few decisions that really irritated me, which makes it hard for me to recommend it as a straight entertaining movie. Snowden’s story is meant to be a hero’s journey of sacrifice and actualization.
I think this movie won’t last long though. It would be a fun story with an interesting relevant theme if it was all fictional. But it’s not meant to be fictional, so I feel that the longer I think about, the less I like it. Maybe Snowden won’t win any Oscars like the documentary Citizenfour did, but if he can use it to convince the President to pardon him, it’ll all be worth it.
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