Amazon.com: Snowden: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley …

Theater review. No one expects Oliver Stone to make a movie thats not controversial. Both in terms of subject matter and his approach. And so it is here. Here he takes on one of the most divisive (aside from politicians) Americans in recent memory. Everyone knows about Edward Snowden, a government employee with top secret access who stole computer files from a facility in Hawaii.

The film opens with Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) in Hong Kong. It is there he begins to tell his story and what he has taken and why. For an excellent award-winning documentary on this phase of Snowdens mission, check out Poitrass Citizenfour. We see Snowden in flashback as a small, but game Army recruit trying to make it as a Ranger. His weak leg bones wouldnt hold up and he was eventually discharged. He then signed up to work for the CIA and worked in Europe, not only as an analyst but briefly as a field agent. That wasnt for him.

A significant portion of the film involves his relationship with Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley). Frankly I was surprised to see that Stone, who also wrote the screenplay with Kieran Fitzgerald, spent so much time on this romance. I suspect to add some flavor as well as the human aspect to what otherwise could be a cold and calculating story. In truth, it is the cold and calculating portion of the film that is the most interesting.

As Snowden rises in the ranks and get access to more and more information, he discovers that the U. S. government is spying more on its own citizens than those of its enemies. This is all terribly interesting, very scary and evidently true. The film is flush with wonderful actors. Rhys Ifans plays Corbin OBrian, Snowdens mentor along with Nicolas Cage as Hank Forrester. Joely Richardson is Janine Gibson, editor of The Guardian and Timothy Olyphant is a CIA operative in Geneva and Snowdens boss at the time. The film runs long at 134 minutes. Whatever your position is on Snowden, traitor or hero or something in between, the film is entertaining and leaves no doubt as to what Stones position is.

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