'Snowden'

The Secret History Of Today

The Guardian had an advance screening of Oliver Stone's new film 'Snowden' so I got to tag along. I was hoping for somebody from the Production to turn up and talk about the film but the Q&A apparently turned out to be about whistleblowing and journalism. I didn't stay for it as I headed to a pub for a feed.

Of course protecting whistleblowers is important, but nobody really steps up to protect those people because they are in a sense, enemy of the state when they do that. The state, has long arms, even longer than the ones it's supposed to have by its own laws. And that's enough of a topic for Oliver Stone to be making this film.

As Oliver Stone films go, it's not as didactic as his other historically inspired films. It feels much like a docudrama, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is a standout. Rhys Ifans turn as "O'Brien" was brought with accent issues. Nicolas Cage has an odd cameo-like role trying to restrain his Nicolas-Cage-Acting, and Zachary Quinto too is understated even by his standard of understated-ness.



What's Good About It

The film lays out who the guy was in the context of the US Security apparatus. We've been told by Barrack Obama he was a hacker. The Stone film begs to differ - and even subtracting from the myth-making for which Oliver Stone has a propensity - the man is not some low level hacker that glommed on to state secrets and absconded. No, he was implicitly and explicitly a careerist in the institutions of surveillance and espionage.

The film goes to great lengths to explain just how intrusive the government had gone through the use of its technology, and how enmeshed the military industrial complex has become in being able to prosecute a data wagon every individual on the planet. As an Oliver Stone film, it's relatively short on bombast and discursiveness, but the cerebral nature of the concern is undeniably Stone's work.

What's Bad About It

It's rather unclear about Snowden's own moral conversion to seeing the point of view where this kind of government surveillance was actually a public problem that had to be dealt with in the public sphere and debated. The motivation is weak - as far as cinematic and dramatic depictions are concerned. That being said, he might indeed have just had a eureka moment that made him do the whistle-blowing.

There's also a lot more to Ed Snowden getting to Russia on his way to Ecuador, which is glossed over with a montage towards the end. The film sort of starts telling that story but curtails that venture quickly and finishes off with a scene to do with Ed Snowden presenting his case in a public forum. The film was already long, but it could have done with the escape from Hong Kong.

What's Interesting About It

The rampant growth of the US Security apparatus came about in the wake of 9/11. It is often argued that the intelligence failure in preventing 9/11 led to this rampant growth, but the film argues that the terror threat is small potatoes next to the big issue of fighting a cyberspace war with China and Russia. Neither of those two states have any democratic shackles to put on their surveillance and espionage in cyberspace while American democracy affords itself restrictions, and thus you have agencies who lie to governments about what they do and how.

If this film were made prior to 9/11 describing an imaginary 2013, it would have been a science fiction-tinged action movie directed by the late great Tony Scott - probably starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. Yeah Tony Scott sure had this story down even before 9/11. As things stand, Stone's film is a very sombre film after the fact, about just how much the US surveillance system has grown and how paranoia may indeed be the most appropriate response to the increased surveillance. Essentially it confirms all of the paranoia from 'Enemy the State'. The sombreness is to be expected given that when you find out all the fantastically wild paranoia is legitimate, your world grows that much colder.

It's Not A Conspiracy Theory If They're Really Watching You

Just how invasive is the surveillance? We've been told by Edward Snowden, just how much infiltration and malware distribution and cyberspace intrusion goes on with not only other nations' leaders but also just about any person on the planet with an internet connection. It's a strange feeling to come to the realisation that these organs have been listening in all the time to everything and have everything indexed ("Hey, including this blog! Somebody's reading this site! Hooray!") and the notion that the world is totally transparent to those who watch creeps you out.

This stuff used to be the provenance of conspiracy theorists. If you talked about stuff like this, people would joke and tell you to go get your tin foil hat. Well, let's look at that "tin foil hat" for a moment.

The reason "tin foil hats" is a thing is because the tin foil hat represents an attempt to place a Faraday cage around one's head to stop electromagnetic scanning of the brains and thus block agencies from scanning one's thoughts. This far fetched notion that a government might be interested in one's private thoughts is pretty much the crux of the issue, and there are no tin foil hats to help us from the prying government. The government, it turns out need not scan the inner workings of your brain, they merely need to parse the output of your mind - all of it - in order to figure out what you are thinking.

At this point in history, we had better accept that the surveillance state is fully in motion, fully in operation and minimally supervised with negligible oversight. It goes so deep and wide, a faraday cage won't protect you.

Oliver Stone's Getting Sad

There used to be an animal gusto to Stone's films. Whether it was the bombast of 'Platoon' and the slow motion as Sgt. Elias buys it in a hail of bullets, or Al Pacino's marvellous speech about life being about "a game of inches" in 'Any Given Sunday', which crescendoes like an emotional volcano. The best bits of Oliver Stone's films had a stink, a skunk musk of animal spirits. This film was surprisingly short of that kind of blood-guts-and-glory. It's probably a better film for not going to the emotional bombast but at the same time I just want to note just how conspicuous by its absence of bombast this film is, in the annals of Oliver Stone movies.

Maybe Oliver Stone was feeling very dry about the topic because the film has an emotional dry quality to it, even when it touches upon the passion Snowden has for his girlfriend, and the emotional turmoil that is central to Snowden's decision to go public with the secret. I don't know if a dried up desiccated Oliver Stone is all that fun in the movie house. I kind of missed the swagger and full-throated declarations. Maybe he's getting more circumspect. He may even be getting sad. It was weird because I felt sad for him, and he's a very successful film maker. He shouldn't need my sympathy, but watching it, I felt sympathetic for him.