Snowden (2016)

This story is made for an Oliver Stone movie, and the director makes the most of it.  Stone will be remembered for his historic portrayals of pinch points in modern American history, and this film is no exception.
This is a complicated and at times almost unbelievable story, although at this point two things have happened.  Much of the activity that Edward Snowden revealed was happening really was well outside of bounds of what most people could tolerate, and the fact that government would facts to their will has gone so much further that on some level it is kind of passe.
Stone offers up a little bit of “the early days of Edward,” but it’s not long before Snowden is, shall we say, seeing how the sausage gets made. For those viewers who have not seen “Citizenfour” or read many of the articles written about Snowden, the mid-section of Stone’s film could prove incredibly shocking, and may force a trend of people putting pieces of tape over their laptop camera. That covert operations run by our government have the capability to turn on your laptop camera without you knowing it is only one of the revelations here. And as Snowden continues to get deeper into the rabbit hole of privacy invasion, Gordon-Levitt’s performance becomes more exceptional.  Stone made the very smart move to hire a committed, underrated actor to play the challenging lead role, and the result is a film that thrives off its central performance.  This is well worth watching and may it change the way we operate on some level.