If you were to see one film about American whistle-blower Edward Snowden — there is no law saying you have to, but if you were — then the film you want is probably Laura Poitras’s 2014 documentary Citizenfour rather than this biopic from Oliver Stone. It’s being sold as a ‘pulse-pounding thriller’ but oh, if only it were. Instead, it’s psychologically thin, tiresomely hagiographic and doesn’t answer any of the questions you’d like it to answer. Certainly, my pulse failed to oblige and if yours doesn’t behave similarly, I’d be most surprised.
Poitras’s film, which was a proper pulse-pounder, followed Snowden in real time as he was actually in the process of lifting the lid on the US government’s clandestine mass-surveillance programmes. Here, a dramatised version is used as the framing device, so the film begins with Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) first meeting Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at his Hong Kong hotel.
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