Snowden

One time cinematic heavyweight turned drab journeyman director Oliver Stone offers up a paranoid thriller that – despite the perfect subject matter – is rather less paranoid than you’d expect, and is never remotely thrilling.

For those who have been living under a rock/in a cave/on the moon, the story follows this century’s most famous whistleblower, Edward Snowden (played with technical accuracy by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, if not with much charisma), and cuts back and forth between two timelines: from 2004 onwards, showing his early days in the army and with the CIA; and 2013, in the lead-up to the leaking of thousands of classified documents, showing that the NSA had been illegally surveying the American public, as well as America’s allies.

Bearing in mind Stone’s predilections – i.e. his love of conspiracies, Machiavellian scheming and general paranoia – he should have been on safe ground with Snowden, but from the off he tells a generic, characterless tale. Snowden is portrayed as a potential über-soldier, who is forced to give up on that dream due to a severe injury (not entirely accurate, but some truth bending is forgivable), which sets him up as a variant on the all-American hero.

He signs up to the CIA and excels at the tests he’s given, proving himself so capable that he becomes a lynchpin for the intelligence team, a sequence that feels like Stone trying to force a parallel between Snowden and Alan Turing – or at least Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Turing in The Imitation Game. (Oh, and also, that’s not quite true either.) Snowden then finds himself answering to morally bankrupt superiors who talk in hushed, raspy tones that mark them out as so obviously, patently evil that even the Sith would wonder if they weren’t, perhaps, laying it on a little thick.

Given the flair Stone brought to his early films, it’s disheartening to see how flat and televisual he’s allowed his recent output to become. This drabness makes his occasional forays into more striking imagery even more jarring – such as when the deputy CIA director (Rhys Ifans in full on Sith lord-mode) looms over Snowden from a floor to ceiling screen, not-so-subtly threatening his staffer both verbally and via his towering, Oz-like presence.

Then there’s the central relationship between Snowden and his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley doing her best with the little she’s given): Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald make this the beating heart of the story, but Woodley and Gordon-Levitt’s lack of chemistry and the barely-there storyline do an excellent job of eviscerating any potential momentum the story gains from the revelations Snowden happens upon at the NSA.

Snowden’s story is well worth telling, but by forcing it to fit the template of a generic action-thriller it becomes predictable, rote and, worst of all, unreal. Fortunately, there’s already a film that does it justice: Laura Poitras’ excellent 2014 documentary Citizenfour. Does it have paranoia? Tick. Thrills? Tick. And the truth? Double tick.