Snowden (2016) [Blu-ray]
Biography | Drama | Thriller

In 2013, CIA technical expert Edward Snowden stunned the world by revealing a stolen trove of classified U.S. government documents. This Oliver Stone-helmed drama tells the story of the bold theft that exposed secret NSA mass surveillance programs.

Storyline: Snowden stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and is written and directed by Oliver Stone. The script is based on the books The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena. Written by Open Road Films

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson, December 29, 2016 In an interview while promoting his film, White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), Gregg Araki recalls telling Shailene Woodley that she reminded him of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a lot of ways. Araki cited that they both started working in the industry as child actors, have appeared in movies and TV shows at a young age, do not starve for the next paycheck (and hence choose their projects selectively), and approach cinema in a creative and pure way. I would add that they bring an intuitive understanding to the roles they play. It was only a matter of time until Araki or another director would find a project to pair these two smart, attractive actors together. That task fell to Oliver Stone who asked Gordon-Levitt to play the part of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and then offered Woodley the chance to co-star as Snowden's girlfriend, the photographer Lindsay Mills. The relative prominence of Mills in Stone's biopic diverges from the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour (2014) in which Mills receives little to no coverage (and is not even seen). Critics have chastised Stone for creating a hagiography out of his subject but it is Mills who convinces Snowden that he is too self-absorbed and obsessed with his work to care and devote his attention to others' well-being.

The narrative structure and camerawork of Snowden relies considerably on Citizenfour. Stone makes the wise choice of using the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong as the centerpiece of his story for it was the locale where Snowden made his startling revelations about the NSA's bulk collection of people's personal data as well as the surveillance tactics of intelligence agencies. The scenes in Hong Kong comprise the film's "present time" as Stone flashes back and forth between Snowden's interviews in June 2013 and the events that transpired in his life nearly a decade before. It is apparent that Stone and his cast/crew studied the mise-en-scène of Citizenfour very closely. The actors' facial expressions, gestures, general placement in front of the camera, as well as movements mimic their real-life counterparts in Laura Poitras's nonfiction feature. The chameleonic Melissa Leo steps into Poitras's shoes while Zachary Quinto looks and sounds just like Poitras's frequent collaborator, the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. The always dependable Tom Wilkinson portrays Ewen MacAskill, the Washington DC bureau chief for The Guardian, which first unveiled Snowden's story.

Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald set up their script to evolve into a conversion narrative. The first flashback occurs in a pre-dawn set Fort Benning, GA (ca. 2004) where Snowden and his fellow Army trainees participate in rigorous drills and exercises as part of advanced infantry training. Snowden is taught to think and perform like a US soldier. His first date with Mills happens outside the White House where the couple stroll among protesters staging antiwar demonstrations. Snowden believes in the Patriot Act and Operation Iraqi Freedom, informing Mills that he has friends who are serving overseas. His progressive-leaning girlfriend disavows him, proclaiming that she disagrees with US policy toward the war effort. In subsequent scenes depicting Snowden's various jobs with the CIA and NSA, Stone shows how his protagonist's conscience and ways of thinking about government intervention, national security policies, and privacy laws undergo a thoroughgoing shift. In the foreword to the published screenplay of Snowden, Salon.com's David Talbot makes the apt comparison of aligning Snowden's journey from a conservative, young patriot to a fervid advocate of civil liberties with that of Ron Kovic's, who transforms from a gung-ho marine into an ardent antiwar activist in Stone's Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Early in Snowden, the title character prepares for soldiering but a spill from his bunk-bed forces him into the hospital. The quotation in the deck of this review comes from a doctor who tells Snowden that he has two broken legs and will receive an administrative charge. There are plenty of other ways one can serve his/her country, he tells the injured Army recruit. The character's predicament is quite similar to Kovic's who becomes paralyzed from the waist down and must find alternative methods to aid his nation. (You can read my analysis of Kovic's conversion as well as the antiwar discourse of Born on the Fourth of July's literary and cinematic texts in an article published in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance.)

Stone equips his film's hero with two surrogate fathers who share differing worldviews. Having to choose a competing dualistic paternal figure is a thematic trope that Stone has deployed before in Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987) and its sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). While training to become a CIA operative, Snowden meets Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage), an engineer who built radio spyware, encryption machines, and supercomputers during the Cold War. Snowden has an amicable, trusting relationship with Forrester, who grew up during the Kennedy years. Forrester's altruism contrasts markedly with Corbin O'Brian (Rhys Ifans), Snowden's Senior Instructor at the CIA who fastidiously shares certain secrets with his young protégé but also bends the truth. There is a clandestine meeting between Snowden and O'Brian in one of Virginia's wooded hillsides that reminds me of the secret rendezvous between Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) and Mr. "X" (Donald Sutherland) in JFK (1991). (O'Brian is akin to X in both attire and his profound knowledge of covert intelligence operations.) Ifans's O'Brian receives substantially more screen time than Cage's character but it is clear by the third act whose philosophy Snowden ascribes to.

Snowden contains many "talk-about" scenes but Stone and his cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle keep the picture consistently watchable by varying the color temperature of certain shots and individual sequences as well as putting the camera in different positions to provide alternate (aerial) perspectives (see screenshot #10). The movie features key supporting performances by Joely Richardson, Scott Eastwood, Ben Schnetzer, and Ben Chaplin. Stone and Fitzgerald based their script on books about Snowden by Anatoly Kucherena and Luke Harding. They eschew the traditional comprehensive biopic for an insightful two-plus hour examination of the professional and personal risks a courageous American took to expose the intelligence community's web of deceptions and lies.

Snowden is an intelligent drama and a leisurely paced cyber-hacker thriller. Though the movie fared better critically in the US compared to some of Stone's more recent pictures, it struggled to bring in large domestic audience ($21 million at the box office). I realize that the relatively slow pace may be trying for viewers but they will be rewarded with a compelling biopic that packs a lot of information in its run time. Universal delivers exceptional video and crystal clear audio. It's too bad that Universal could not have put Stone's commentary on the Blu-ray but this standard edition still comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[CSW] -2.2- Talk about mixed emotions, I'll get to why they are mixed after the bad. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 Department of Defense files, more than he downloaded from the NSA. Australian officials have estimated 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files and British officials estimate at least 58,000 British intelligence files. NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden had copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents. Snowden only released a small fraction to the news media and WikiLeaks, only information that he thought would not jeopardize national security. All of the rest of the documents were heavily encrypted on Secure Digital (SD) memory cards and Snowden thought that therefore they could never be examined by anyone. He was wrong. Both Russia and China got complete copies of all of the encrypted electronic documents and it appears to have taken each of them almost a year to break the encryption. That time line coincided with both those countries becoming extremely emboldened and putting the United States at a disadvantage. So he was guilty of espionage in a very heinous way that hurt a lot of countries not just the U.S. Now I get to the mixed emotion part. Although there is no way to prove it, it is believed that Snowden wrote most of the programs that were used to gather and analyze the information in the first place. I could almost believe that Snowden was upset because his programs did a lot more than he thought they could and were used in ways that he hadn't anticipated. The programs he wrote are of great service to this country and continue to be, and at the same time he himself did a great disservice to his country. He fits the classic definition of a tragedy where the main character is basically good but has one flaw that leads to his downfall. I am primarily rating this movie lower based on the harm that Snowden did to the country.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box


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