Film: Snowden

Oliver Stone makes it very clear that whistleblower Edward Snowden deserves amnesty in this decent docudrama, which by his standards is surprisingly cool and collected.

Big Brother is watching you." The famous slogan from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 has become incredibly relevant since the Snowden affair. Edward Snowden – he has now received asylum in Russia – made hundreds of thousands of top secret documents public and thereby revealed that the American intelligence service, the NSA, was monitoring civilians online on a massive scale.

Such conspiracies and profound violations of privacy policy would normally by right up Stone's street, given that he is the Hollywood specialist in political paranoia and anti-authoritarianism. Nevertheless, this film of Snowden's life story lacks the visually pulsating drive that you would expect from a Stone film.

There is already an excellent vérité documentary, Citizenfour. Stone's mix of a rather superficial biopic and creepy suspense thriller is based on the same premise as that Oscar-winning documentary: we meet the ever courteous Snowden (an impeccable Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a hotel in Hong Kong at the moment when he is handing over his evidence to the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and two journalists from The Guardian. Long flashbacks then reveal how Snowden evolved – via his NSA mentor (Rhys Ifans) and frustrated girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) – from a conservative geek motivated by 9/11 to a disillusioned patriot who becomes front-page news.

The director of Platoon, JFK, and Nixon never becomes bitingly critical, though he is profoundly uneasy about morally compromised CIA agents or how the American government uses bases in Maryland, Geneva, Tokyo, and Hawaii to flout human rights.

This detailed dossier film featuring a cameo by the real Snowden does make one thing very clear: Snowden is a man with principled views on the role of cyberspace in a democracy.

US, FR, DE, 2016, dir.: Oliver Stone, act.: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Melissa Leo, Shailene Woodley, 134 min.
UGC De Brouckère, UGC Gulden Vlies/Toison d'Or