Film Review: Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ a Lesson for Our Times

CHICAGO – The experience of director Oliver Stone, to look underneath the slimy rocks of government secrecy and bureaucracy, produces an excellent history lesson in “Snowden,” an overview of Edward Snowden, a whistleblower against the government who is still in exile.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Stone is clear on his position on Snowden, who essentially told the world that their privacy rights were being violated through government access into their technology, he is a patriot. How he became that way is fascinating, with the complexities of spying on chilling display. Get your band-aids or masking tape out and tape that camera hole on your computer, or maybe you’re next on the CIA/NSA “candid camera.” That is what the film warns, and again Oliver Stone is the agent provocateur who leads the way to teaching us something through his role, as he puts it, as a dramatist.

The story is told in flashback. Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a high rising tech achiever in government surveillance. After getting an injury discharge in Army special services, he works his way up through the CIA and NSA as a computer gunslinger. By his side is his girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), as they move from assignment to assignment.

He is telling this story in a hotel room in Hong Kong, as his observations in these assignments allow his to realize that no citizen of the U.S. has privacy rights in the New World Order. A documentary maker, Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), and two journalists of the newspaper The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) will tell the world.  

”Snowden” opened everywhere on September 16th. Featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Edward Snowden, Snowden, Shailene Woodley, Rhys Ifan, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson and Nicholas Cage. Screenplay adapted by Oliver Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. Directed by Oliver Stone. Rated “R”