It
would seem a daunting proposition to try to give a dramatization of
events and issues that have already been captured brilliantly on film
just a couple of years prior, as Snowden reenacts a good deal
of the actual footage captured by documentarian Laura Poitras in her
award-winning documentary, Citizenfour.
To be fair, director and co-screenwriter Oliver Stone (W.,
World Trade Center), who has
spent a good portion of his filmmaking career exploring the dangers of
government tyranny, fleshes out more than that by giving us much more
biographical information about his title subject, showing his time in
the military, his obtaining a job working for the CIA, his eventual
hire as a contractor for the NSA, and his relationship with his
longtime girlfriend. Alas, just like the opinions exhibited by Snowden
within the film, the more we know, the less we like what we see.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Night Before,
The Walk) stars as Edward Snowden
(doing a reasonable interpretation of his voice and demeanor), a
neoconservative wanting to serve his country but whose military career
is cut short due to frequent injuries, turning his sights to working
to help is country in another capacity though a career in government
intelligence. He proves to be more than adept at this job, which
allows him to climb the ranks to higher and higher levels of security
clearance within the CIA. However, the closer he looks at their
programming, the more disturbed he is to find just how intrusive many
of the surveillance software and techniques are under both the Bush
and Obama administrations, leading him to have a crisis of conscience
on whether the American public has a right to know about how their
privacy has eroded in the computer, smart phone, internet and social
media age.
Unfortunately, Snowden's story is much more interesting for what he
did than for who he is, which relegates much of the build-up to that
which has already been captured so well in Citizenfour to be
only moderately engaging at best. Trying to inject a love story of
sorts proves to be a bit of a bust, as there's nothing intrinsically
interesting about Snowden's relationship with amateur photographer
Lindsay Mills (Woodley, Allegiant)
that merits much screen time, save for a somewhat prolonged sex
scene and an excuse to show a few instances of provocative pole
dancing. The better scenes revolve around Snowden on the job,
discovering more each day about how intrusive the US government is
when it comes to gathering information, which seems to go well above
and beyond what's allowable within the law, spying on and gathering
vast warehouses full of information on just about everyone it wants
to, even searching through private conversations to find any scrap of
information that it can use for leverage later.
Nevertheless, the film retains a modicum of watchability and interest
throughout, enough to make for a well-acted, handsomely mounted,
occasionally thought-provoking and moderately entertaining film that
has a few major faults (excessive length and a misguided
infomercial-style ending that tries in vain to tie the Hollywood story
to real life among them). Despite many attempts to flesh out the
character of Snowden as to who he is and why he believes what he
believes, he remains an enigma throughout, never allowing us the
chance to see Snowden as heroic as Stone obviously sees him, even for
those who firmly believe that he has done the noble thing through his
whistleblowing activities. What we end up learning is that the
message is more important than the messenger, the code more important
than the codebreaker.
Qwipster's rating
:
©2016 Vince Leo
