#77: Snowden (2016)

In May 2013 Edward Joseph Snowden walked out of a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii with thousands of classified documents, and, after fleeing the country, released them to the public. A heroic act, or a traitorous one, depending on your point of view.

In January 2016 Edward Hart Jefferson decided to win the lottery by watching every Nicolas Cage film, in order, and picking numbers inspired by each film — his theory being that magical forces that produce a typical Nicolas Cage performance might be powerful enough to make him rich. The jury is still out on that one.

My name is Ed. I watched every film Nicolas Cage had ever made. I did not win the lottery.

But Nicolas Cage did not stop making films.

I last encountered the work of Oliver Stone when Cage played a firefighter in turgid 9–11-based dross World Trade Center. I suppose at least Snowden has a happier ending.

For it is the exciting true-life tale of the spy/hacker guy who revealed America’s secrets to the world, here played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, putting on a much deeper (and consequently, sillier) voice than usual in what is presumably a misguided attempt at an impersonation of the real Snowden. I mean, that’s what I presumed until the final scene, which cuts from Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden to the man himself, who gets to deliver the final bit of saccharine make-you-think. At which point I started yelling at the television: because he sounds absolutely nothing like whatever the hell it is Joseph Gordon-Levitt was doing for the preceding 2 hours.

But what the film was doing for the preceding 2 hours is a fairly straightforward chronicle of Snowden’s intelligence career: discharged from the army after breaking his legs, he realises he can instead serve America with his amazing cyberhacking skills. After spending the next few years doing naughty things for the American government he changes his mind, downloads state secrets onto a Rubix cube and fucks off. The end.

In between all that he gets a girlfriend, Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who is very useful for the film because she allows us to witness sophisticated political debate such as:

SNOWDEN: The liberal media is bad and damages our country. I respect the president.

MILLS: I disagree.

AUDIENCE: Oh, the delightful irony of it all!

He also gets a mentor — and, hey, guess what, it’s Nicolas Cage. He doesn’t get a lot to do — he’s only in about three scenes, but he makes a decent fist of the fairly limp material. Not notable, but not notably bad, and he brings a least a little charm to his thankless role, a weary former wunderkind kept in the CIA’s basement in case any passing trainees ever need a lecture on the corrupt nature of the military-industrial complex.

Snowden’s other mentor is his CIA boss, Rhys Ifans, who, SPOILERS, turns out to be a rotter who’s prepared to do all sorts of dubious things in the name of national security. Stone named the character O’Brian as a ‘clever’ allusion to Orwell’s 1984; at the point Ifans’ face is looming at Snowden out of a gigantic video screen the film might as well have a “DO YOU SEE?” caption.

If anything in the film succeeds, it’s the framing sequences in which Snowden, holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, relates his story to journalists. Partly because Zachary Quinto (Glenn Greenwald) et al are among the better bits of casting, partly because the scenes are too simple to fuck up.

Gordon Levitt’s strange vocal choice is perhaps just one symptom of the problem with the entire film: too often it seems to have failed to discover anything interesting in the truth, so makes something up to fill the gap. It ends up as this slightly lame spy thriller — it won’t leave reality far enough behind to do anything really fun, but it gets far enough away that it stops ringing true.

I don’t know whether there really was a tense moment where Snowden watched a progress bar agonisingly crawl to 100% as the secret files were copied over. But if it did really happen, ‘Snowden’ fails to make anything more of it than a thousand other scenes in a thousand entirely fictional stories. So what’s the point?

THE NUMBERS

3 — Cage’s character, Hank Forrester — worked on a project that would have cost 3 million dollars to set up in-house. It was taken away from him, and outsourced, costing 4 billion dollars. Naughty government!

4 — Snowden is 4 minutes late for his first meeting with the journalists at the start of the film.

12 —When they meet they exchange some code phrases involving a restaurant being open at noon. And the food being too spicy.

14 — Edward Snowden meets his girlfriend on ‘geek-mate.com’, where she has the username JourneyGirl_14. They chat about anime. I don’t know whether this is meant to be the only funny bit in the film or not.

38 —It takes Edward Snowden 38 minutes to complete the special cyber hacking test to get into CIA cyber hacking school. This is apparently unlikely to be true, but you have to put things like this in films for so that some notional stupid person can follow it.

54 — In the film, Snowden hides the SD card full of secret files in a Rubik’s cube to smuggle it out. Rubik’s cubes, invented by architecture professor Ernő Rubik, have 54 squares. In real life Snowden has never revealed how he did it. Is that code for “I put it up my bum?”

THE RESULT

0 numbers.

I now agree that Edward Snowden is an extremely bad man who should be in prison.

NEXT TIME, ON WINNING THE LOTTERY WITH NICOLAS CAGE:

USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. Which was renamed USS Indianapolis: Disaster in the Philippine Sea in the first country it was released in, the Philippines. Marketing, what a science.