Review: Oliver Stone’s Snowden is an over-the-top bore

While Oliver Stone has been on some sort of cruise control (rehab?) for the better part of this century, releasing uninspiring dreck like Savages and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, there is no denying the manic energy of his earlier work through the 80’s and 90’s. Stone has traditionally been at his most effective when tackling the political realm, from the incendiary conspiracies theories of JFK to the more subdued but equally compelling Nixon. With that in mind, expectations were high for Snowden, Stone’s adaptation of the life of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, whose leaking of classified documents revealed the shocking scope of America’s secret mass surveillance program.

Unfortunately, Stone has managed the herculean feat of turning Snowden’s fascinating story into a schmaltzy biopic that is little more than simple hero worship. Stone uses the infamous Hong Kong meetings between Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo), and journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill  (Tom Wilkinson) to bookend the film, flashing backwards through Snowden’s life to focus on his early military training, his roles within the CIA and the NSA, and his relationship with his long-time girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley).

The problem with focusing on Snowden’s fateful whistle-blowing sessions is that those encounters were already captured in Laura Poitras’ 2014 Citizenfour documentary, a film that did a much better job of focusing on Snowden’s complex motivations and the utter chaos that resulted from his actions. Those moments in Snowden only serve to hammer home the fact that a compeling document of these meetings is readily accessible, and Stone offers little new insight or visual flair to justify this adaptation just two years after Poitras’ film.

Stone makes no bones about his near-worship of Snowden, and as a result the whole film comes off like a love letter, from the embarrassingly over-the-top score to the final shots of the real Edward Snowden staring wistfully out into the distance. The actors generally do their best with the uninspired script, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in particular nailing the gravelly-voiced and shy Snowden. With such an impressive cast, it’s unfortunate that they are given so little to do. There is no nuance in Stone’s film, nor any suspense really. We see Snowden navigate through the CIA and the NSA swiftly, where the only pushback to the system he encounters is professor Hank Forrester (played with subdued glee by Nicolas Cage, who steals every bit of the minimal screen time he gets here). As Snowden is granted deeper access, he learns that the NSA is in fact recording more data from unsuspecting Americans than they are from their supposed foes overseas. He seems mildly troubled by this fact, but only becomes truly enraged when a supervisor implies that he has been keeping tabs on Snowden’s girlfriend, a conversation that unfolds via a giant-sized video screen even more ridiculous than the holographic Supreme Leader Snoke meeting from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The only excitement in the film comes in the final few moments, when Snowden is being whisked from his Hong Kong hotel to the airport. Suddenly, we’re bombarded by the claustrophobic high-rises of the city as Snowden makes his stealthy escape from the hordes of press camped out in front of the hotel, and Stone offers up a rare glimpse of his flashy editing style from earlier films like JFK and Natural Born Killers.

While Stone is obviously passionate about Snowden’s decision to raise the curtain on the US’ hidden surveillance program, there is little here to win over any new converts. The last thing one would hope for in Stone’s treatment of this story would be to play it safe, which is exactly what he has done here. This should have been a movie to make your hair stand on end, a deep dive into one man’s struggle against an un-checked government running rampant over the rights of its citizens, helmed by a director responsible for some of the most divisive movies of our time. Privacy issues and government control are perhaps the most pressing issues we face today, and a rabble-rouser like Stone should have been able to produce something vital and revealing from this material. Instead, we basically get a schmaltzy TV Movie of the Week, complete with an eye-rolling Peter Gabriel track in the closing credits that demonstrates just how on-the-nose Snowden is: “Show exactly what is going on / Show exactly who is looking on / Let it all go / Set it free.”