SNOWDEN review by Rahul Vedantam – Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden

SNOWDEN review by Rahul Vedantam – Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden

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SNOWDEN showcases just why Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so beloved if failing to show why Edward Snowden might not be so. Director Oliver Stone and Gordon-Levitt took a trip to Moscow to meet Snowden and help learn the character, Joe’s takeaway seems to be a perfect portrayal of the tech genius with a moral dilemma. But Stone’s takeaway is that he should go overboard in lionizing Snowden rather than addressing the complicated drama that makes this story so compelling.

The movie arranges itself as a series of flashbacks, slowly showing his realization of the NSA power through his first interview with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian, and documentarian Laura Poitras in a Hong Kong hotel room. The movie does not try to over-dramatize itself with fiction, if it does focus heavily on Snowden himself rather than the NSA scandal. This is shown most clearly by the role of Lindsey (Shailene Woodley), Snowden’s girlfriend. She becomes a focus of the movie to show the difficult choice Snowden had to make between his comfortable life with her or sacrificing his own freedoms for the benefit of others.

There is a lot to be called heroic in Edward Snowden’s life, but without any sort of nuance in the discussion it falls flat in provoking discussion. The key reason to see this film becomes Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance instead of an interesting look at the events that led up to the publication of his information. The more interesting movie to see would be the Academy Award winning documentary Laura Poitras would release after that meeting in Hong Kong, titled CITIZENFOUR.

It feels unfair to compare the two movies, as SNOWDEN clearly knew about the importance of that documentary and wanted to take a more biopic centered route. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the production’s most interesting aspect hinging on topics covered better in CITIZENFOUR. If only Joseph Gordon-Levitt could have replaced real life Edward Snowden for that documentary…

SNOWDEN opens September 16th, 2016

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