Snowden 2016

Theater review. No one expects Oliver Stone to make a movie that’s not controversial. Both in terms of subject matter and his approach. And so it is here. Here he takes on one of the most divisive (aside from politicians) Americans in recent memory. Everyone knows about Edward Snowden, a government employee with top secret access who stole computer files from a facility in Hawaii.

The film opens with Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto), Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) in Hong Kong. It is there he begins to tell his story and what he has taken and why. For an excellent award-winning documentary on this phase of Snowden’s mission, check out Poitras’s “Citizenfour.” We see Snowden in flashback as a small, but game Army recruit trying to make it as a Ranger. His weak leg bones wouldn’t hold up and he was eventually discharged. He then signed up to work for the CIA and worked in Europe, not only as an analyst but briefly as a field agent. That wasn’t for him.