89th Academy Awards season begins in earnest with the arrival of Oliver Stone’s “Snowden.”
A bio pic of the notorious (or famed, depending on your point of view) thief of the most secret of the United States’ spy secrets that Edward Snowden eventually fled to Moscow where, as of this writing, he languishes … a fugitive from American justice and because of his revelations, the entire global intelligence community has been tossed onto its collective heads.
Stone is very gentle onto his lead character, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“The Dark Knight Rises”) who we first see sequestered in The Mira Hotel in Hong Kong by reporters for the London-based The Guardian newspaper and on the run from American law enforcement agents who are ready to tie him up like a hog for the slaughter and chuck him into the first prison they can find.
Snowden spends endless days and nights spilling nearly all his secrets to a trio of Guardian reporters, which in turn eventually put his video interviews on worldwide television.
But Snowden is much more than just a retelling of all of America’s dirty little secrets as director Stone takes us back to the beginning — of Snowden’s flunking out of US Military training through a freak accident (he tore the muscles of his right leg jumping out of bed one morning) and instead finds himself being actively recruited by the National Security Agency.
Stone’s portrayal of Edward Snowden would have us see this analyst more superhuman than mortal — Snowden could not just look at computer code and the interconnection of the internet but comprehend all of its complexity. At one point, late in the film, with special effects ala “The Matrix,” Snowden peers into the internet and drags the movie audience along as he sees every link between you and I, dear reader, as well as millions upon millions of simultaneous users.
Snowden also exemplifies America’s incredible abuse of this power, as Snowden watches its military track down would-be terrorists through their cell phone and mobile connections to drop a “smart” bomb from 35,000 feet. Once the dust settles and more “terrorists” arrive, they too have a warhead laser painted on them.
Eventually, Snowden is assigned to work at America’s super-secret NSA spy facility on Oahu, Hawaii, where the prized analyst turns traitor and copies absolutely everything the US Government has in its files onto a flash drive that he hides inside a Rubik’s Cube and walks right out the door.
It seemed so easy, but for Ed Snowden, the chase is on.
Hiding out at his Hong Kong hotel, Snowden is revealed to the world by The Guardian and every reporter in the world after him.
Eventually he is smuggled out of China and lands in Moscow.
Stone’s version of the events are clearly slanted to garner the most sympathy for Snowden who broke more laws than can be counted and set governments around the globe against each other. No one, before Ed Snowden’s revelations, knew the depths the American and United Kingdom would go to spy on all of their presumed enemies and friends.
This movie is a bitter pill to swallow — knowing from a moral point of view what Edward Snowden did was absolutely correct.
We now know that no one in the world is safe — that even when you use a laptop with the camera off, the Americans can still use it to watch your every move and keystroke.
That when you click “accept” to run a program or join even the most innocent web program, all of your personal data is at risk.
And so Oliver Stone exits this sure-to-be Academy Award nominated film with numerous questions.
Should Edward Snowden be pardoned by the soon-to-be exiting US President Barack Obama?
Does the crime justify the act?
Snowden betrayed not only his friends, family and co-workers but by breaking his oaths of secrecy and revealing to the world what the NSA was really doing, became a traitor to his people and nation.
Stone also subtlety asks this: If the circumstance were the same, would you, dear reader, make the same choices as Edward Snowden and because of it, live the rest of your life in either permanent exile or permanent prison?
Heady choices indeed.
And the winner for Best Picture goes to …
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