Kritiken

Some found this relatively muted biopic disappointingly flat (it's actually less of a thriller than the Snowden documentary Citizenfour), but it's sobriety is grounded in diligence... Snowden doesn't have the gripping sense of cutting-edge reportage you get in Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, that film's director, is played by Melissa Leo here), but it does flesh out Snowden's story without making the personal any less political.

A noble but bland attempt to dramatize the story of the biggest leak of national security secrets in American history. It is better than Stone's political films from the past decade, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's portrayal of Edward Snowden is outstanding, but too often it feels like a TV after-school special version of a tremendously significant slice of history, one that, as a film, could have benefited from a touch of the visual and narrative hysteria Stone and Richardson employed in the '90s.

Snowden turns rogue integer, but Stone's film remains mostly trapped in its own nefarious network, that of biopic clichés. Replaying the conversion narrative of Born on the Fourth of July while lacking its heat and complexity, it evokes infinite realms of possibility and danger brought about by technology but is itself disappointingly earthbound.

Stone's own presence as a director is oppressive. It's as if he's phoning it in from O'Brian's video-call system, with big, obvious touches that might be confused with mastery. Even his splashier techniques, like the shifts in focus when Snowden fades in and out of consciousness during an epileptic attack, were used more eloquently in The Maltese Falcon 75 years ago.

[It was surprising] how much Citizenfour played like a Hollywood thriller, investing simple email exchanges and hotel-room conversations with a riveting sense of paranoid urgency. No one would likely have predicted, sight unseen, that Stone's treatment of the same events would seem staid and dull by comparison. And yet here's Snowden: a duly serious and ambitious fall movie that, despite the best efforts of its formidable director and cast, can't remotely match the excitement of real life.

For most of this polished, measured and curiously banal movie, the director seems to be making a clear effort to rein in his more excessive impulses. He maintains a cool dramatic temperature throughout, as though channeling the mood and personality of Snowden himself — a quiet, thoughtful and supremely meticulous young man who looks entirely ill-suited to the role that history chose for him.

Snowden's action, of course, is historic; the events that led to that action are, in Stone's telling, occasionally fascinating; but Stone's depiction of Edward Snowden is as flat, thin, and artificial as the Snowbot—the video screen on wheels through which Snowden makes virtual public appearances worldwide, which turns up near the end of the film.

It's often up to the characters Snowden meets along the way, especially his CIA mentor Corbin O'Brien (a composite figure, played with snarling glee by Rhys Ifans), to keep the energy from flagging. The approach mostly works, though the overall mood remains one of muted despair rather than heated outrage.

Although Gordon-Levitt's presence helps to keep us invested in the story, you'll be left wondering how this dull, overlong film might have turned out in the hands of a less bombastic filmmaker. The appearance of the real Edward Snowden, playing himself at the end of the film, is the cherry on a cake of misguidedness and pomposity. What should be an elegant, awe-inspiring, grounding moment instead comes off as triumphalist and silly.

The ideal candidate for this material would be David Fincher or perhaps Steven Soderbergh; Stone's corny direction recasts Snowden as the brooding, fist-clenching hero of a bogus spy movie... Incapable of visualizing digital-age surveillance outside of wall-sized screens and close-ups of cameras, Stone collects all of the silliest clichés about computing in a grab-bag aesthetic that tries every kind of pointlessly filtered or grainy look, but can't seem to fake a convincing webcam shot.

The movie that we have in front of us is a faint murmur of the politically explosive entertainment it could have been. At almost every step of the way, Stone opts for the uninteresting, even risible choice.

The real Snowden is still a wanted man, currently in temporary asylum in Russia to avoid being charged under the Espionage Act at home. And ordinary Americans are still coming to terms with his contention that their private affairs can be netted by a vast electronic dragnet. Yet Snowden feels like a stale argument for his legacy as a patriot, rather than a man whose story is ongoing and whose revelations are important right now.