Question time | 8 December 2016

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. The narrative then spools back to tell his story — how did he end up here? — which is fine, and as expected, but it never satisfies as the whole story.

We learn, for example, that he never finished high school, but not why. We learn, should you happen to wish for a further example, that his grandfather was in the Pentagon on 9/11, but not why. (I now know that glandular fever interrupted his education and that his grandfather was a rear admiral who later became a senior official with the FBI; there is a dark side to cyberspace, but Wikipedia is pretty useful.) Stone, who co-wrote the script, seems so certain that Snowden is a hero — he is portrayed as absolutely on the side of right at all times — that that’s all we need to know about him.