Saturday 8 October 2016

Film No. 59 (2016) Snowden October 4th.

Film No. 59 (2016) October 4th.  1.10 PM LUNA SX Fremantle.


"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honour you can give an American" (A quote from the real Ed Snowden during a Skpyed Q & A with a quorum of U.S. Grad. students in 2014).






Oliver Stone steps up to the biographical feature film making plate once a again, after a lengthy absence, to give us Snowden. His bio's from the 90's are legendary; The Doors (1991), J.F.K. (1991)and Nixon (1995) represent his best efforts. Snowden is both enjoyable and something of a disappointment. If it wasn't in the hands of Stone I wouldn't have used the term disappointment; I was simply surprised this usually hard hitting director incorporated some incongruous scenes and characters. More on that later.


Unless one has been living under a rock over the last 5 years, Ed Snowden is to whistle blowing what Usain Bolt is to world athletics. Snowden "blabbed" to the world about the surveillance practices of both the CIA and the NCA. Practices kept "in house" for purposes of national security. In many ways this is a complex subject told by a  unique filmmaker about an uncomplicated, intelligent young man. Thus, Snowden is an accomplished slice of entertainment. Stone, if nothing else, gives mainly younger audiences an opportunity to understand the motives of an ordinary moral guy embroiled in extraordinary circumstances.


Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a great job of playing a bland Snowden. We meet Ed in a Hong Kong hotel room conducting his Citizen Four interviews with British journalists only days after fleeing his Hawaii base. From here we flick backwards and forwards through time tracking Snowden's career as first a failed soldier then a clever Internet Protocol expert, keen to serve his country to the point of creating software critical to national security; or is it? Shailene Woodley as girlfriend Lindsay gives a grounded performance which is supposedly close to the truth.


It's true that Stone has done his research as he always does. It's just that Corbin O'Brian (Rhys Ifans) and Hank Forrester (Nicholas Cage) are too simplistically two dimensional for a Stone original. There is an unintended laughable quality about some of their scenes. The real Snowden endorsed the film, this is evident in the closing sequences so perhaps I'm being over critical. That said, Snowden is a thorough, informative entertainment which doesn't quite live up to Stone's previous classics but it's classy never the less.  9GUMS.








   

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