Is it not a bit early to already make a film about Edward Snowden? Did Stone want to make sure he would be the first or is the film meant to financially support Snowden? On the other hand, maybe the film already comes too late.
The film tells a story we all heard about. Edward Snowden is the most famous person to leak classified information. He rose in governmental security agencies and then gets second thoughts on the enormous scale of information that these agencies gather of the general public and how easy it is to stick ones nose in the most intimate details of a persons life. Snowden decides to gather information to back up his story and blow the whistle hard.
The film is set around the meetings with journalists that Snowden set up in a hotel in Hong Kong in 2013 and the rest of the story is told in flash-back. This story is well-known and I must say that I expected a bit more ‘level’ of Oliver Stone. The film does not really manage to set the atmosphere of suppression and paranoia that the story needs and Snowdens appointments do not really raise ‘WTF reactions’, which should make ‘the general public’ raise against the governments that do that to us. The film is actually just a mediocre thriller around a story that we already knew. Perhaps the dismay that Snowdens revealings originally gave already ebbed away and the film does not manage to bring it back.
Maybe the film does not come too early (Snowden still lives in Moskou and never came to answer for himself, so the end is untold), but too late (little probably changed, but who really cares?).
