"Snowden," directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is surprisingly dull. However, make no mistake: Snowden's motivation for blowing the whistle on the US government's spying on everyone is simple: He was watching his fellow citizens' privacy made extinct by a shadow government he was helping to created. He was abetting a crime and he knew he had to do something. You have to wonder by Stone felt the need to make this movie since the definitive film had already been made. The 2014 Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour, directed by Laura Poitras, is a movie with all of the drama and thrills you could want because it was shot in real time, when the world was just learning about Snowden and the information he had. It seems Stone assumes you've seen Citizenfour so he doesn't take time to take you into the real world of Edward Snowden.
As Poitras knew, the story of NSA's mass collection of information from the laptops and cellphones of private citizens is a complicated one and there's no way to make it simple. Nonetheless, "Snowden" relies on every manner of movie convention and emotional shortcut. Snowden, played by an earnest Gordon-Levitt, is an eager-seeming, vaguely cocky 20-something, not the cerebral Snowden of the interviews Poitras did with him in a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013 that went global just as the first stories by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) were being published. The romance between Snowden and Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who now resides with him in Russia, takes up too much of the running time, but that contributes to the 'conventional movie' feel. "Snowden" is about what a citizen owes his country when that country's actions are criminal. Stone's filmmaking is so off that you are likely to forget what the real issues are.
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