'Snowden' A Review

Snowden is a biographical thriller about the life of former CIA analyst and subsequent whistleblower Edward Snowden. The film opens on Snowden(Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in Hong Kong in 2013 meeting with Glenn Greenwall(Zachary Quinto) and Laura Poitras(Melissa Leo). They then begin to conduct the now famous interview which was reported in The Guardian and presented in the documentary Citizenfour. The film uses the Hong Kong hotel room as the constant as the life of Ed Snowden is spooled out. He flunks out of basic training, gets a girlfriend, joins the CIA, resigns the CIA, begins contracting with the NSA, then back with the CIA again until he decides to release information on the USA's covert, questionable. and near total surveillance of foreign and domestic individuals.

JGL as Snowden utilizes a very bizarre voice in an effort to evoke Snowden's flat speech pattern, this threatens to derail the film in the first ten minutes as it comes off as so over-the-top but eventually settles in to something resembling normalcy. For the most part JGL is servicable as Snowden but he comes across as almost totally neutral and reactive, reserved to the point that it seems he is in a constant un-changing state of low-level stress. Shailene Woodley tries very hard as Snowden's girlfriend Lindsay Mills and this misplaced earnestness paired with her unbelievable motivations and cliche dialogue make for one dissonant performance. The two don't have much chemistry to speak of, their ten year age difference doesn't help, and the romance and relationship they are forced to act out, such as it is, seems to belong to a different movie altogether. The supporting cast all fair much better with a delightful villainous and gravely turn by Rhys Ifans as a CIA higher up. But all the performances are all oddly stilted and presentational a disappointment with such a large talented cast.

Visually sufficient the one or two sequences with actual style(mostly scenes of hacking) are deflated by the extremely conventional and repeated trope of flashing a skyline with a city name and year. This device is used to help with continuity but it is so overused(within the film and without) it is exhausting. The score is so sappy and melodramatic it is distracting to the point of laughter. Whatever stylistic panache director Oliver Stone once had has waned with age.

Certainly the issues raised by Snowden's actions and subsequently portrayed in the film are important but the film seems to be more interested in instilling fear of big brother and deifying Snowden than actually delving into the complicated issue of privacy in our digital age.

Don't See It.