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Snowden - The latest from Oliver Stone

Whenever a new movie directed and/or written by Oliver Stone emerges, I expect it to be controversial, ideological and fairly hard hitting. With that in mind, I was ambivalent about seeing Snowden, figuring that it would be a polemic of some sort. I was surprised to see that Snowden receives little propagandizing, that the story is pretty straightforward, as though taken from a Wikipedia account. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden, Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, Rhys Ifans as Snowden’s CIA handler and Melissa Leo and Zachary Quinto as reporters working with Snowden. We also see Nick Cage in a small role as a CIA non-conformist, relegated to the basement level of work due to his eccentricities.

Snowden starts out in 2013, after his much publicized release of extensive secret computer documents that detailed the scope and extent of US digital surveillance and his subsequent exile in Russia. There really isn’t much that can be a spoiler here because the beginning of the movie is the end of the story of how this happened. We know how it ends as the movie begins; the rest is a flashback. The narrative starts out with Edward Snowden as a genius high school dropout, joining the army, but receiving a service ending injury during basic training. Being zealous about his desire to serve his country, Snowden subsequently worked for the CIA, the NSA and for government contractors that work in digital surveillance. It culminates (the beginning of the movie) when Snowden comes to the conclusion that he can’t, in good conscience, continue the work he does, believing it to be a gross violation of the rights of citizens to digital privacy.

The conundrum to Snowden, both the man and the movie, is whether he was right to do what he did. On the one hand, he earnestly believes that the spying is wrong and unconstitutional, but on the other, he did swear oaths promising to NOT do exactly what he did. Nobody can claim that he did it accidentally, that he was misled or delusional. Snowden, with his 145 IQ, knows exactly what he is doing, plots it out methodically and knows that his life will be in the trash can, even if he is not killed. This is quite clear in the movie.

Snowden, the movie, is excellent at clarifying this story. It also does a fairly decent job of explaining the extent of information collection, and the scope of events that can follow from what has been called “connecting the dots”. As a person who spent a big part of my life working in the world of digital information, it’s quite obvious to me that all of us leave digital footprints everywhere. Credit cards, cell phone usage, internet usage, social media…everything we do that is not specifically calculated to be “off the grid” leaves those footprints. This has been massively publicized and shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. Our information is all out there to be collected and correlated, and even if our government doesn’t do it, other governments will, as will service providers, advertisers, gangsters or anybody else who realizes that people put all the details of their life in Facebook, just for starters. It’s naive and unrealistic to NOT realize this.

Because of that, to me, Snowden, both the movie and the man’s revelations, is yesterday’s news. I knew how the story played out before I walked into the theater and knew about how the information is used, before the real events. Nevertheless, I thought that the movie dealt with the issues quite well. Part of the movie seems to be an ernest attempt to explain how all this works, in terms that a movie audience can comprehend, what it means to connect the dots. I thought the movie succeeded in that. It also appeared that the cast had a belief in the story. There’s a lot of sincerity in the acting and general feel of the movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is excellent at mimicking the real Edward Snowden and giving the film a documentary feel. Even though we know how the story ends right at the beginning, the film does a good job of keeping up the suspense. Snowden is more visually interesting than most Stone films. It uses a lot of graphical devices to illustrate the connections that are made with all of the data, from social media photographs, to government information, to drone attacks in other counties. It’s all tied together in vivid pictures and animation. It’s scary how all this connects….a digital horror movie.

I enjoyed Snowden. As I said previously, I knew how the story came out, how all this connecting the dots activity works, but I liked having the story of this man told without a lot of preaching, from either the good or evil perspective. Oliver Stone can’t entirely resist preaching, but there’s only a little bit of it at the end. Most of it is procedural, letting Snowden, the facts and the story speak for themselves. It’s a fine piece of that old tradition of “ripped from the headlines” movies. It’s not much for date night, but well worth seeing.