Welp. If you’re looking for the hum-dinger of surveillance stories, this is kind of it. I mean, I didn’t mean to blow my wad on the whole surveillance theme this early in the month but, shit. While technically still a fictional account of the story, and you can be assured some of this has been beautified up to meet movie storytelling standards, it’s still basically a documentary in pretty trappings. You know what they say about documentaries, wait til you hear the other side too. In this case? Bring it on. Since it went down, not much for counter arguments that don’t basically fall into the slander of character category. Huh! Weird. You would think there would be some legit discountings to this one. So I have a feeling the test of time will prove this one out, whether we like it or not.
This is the story of Edward Snowden, relaying some key points of his life from the time he entered the armed services, to joining the Alphabet companies and his work that took place there. Dramatized, for your convenience, Joseph Gordon-Levitt seems to do a pretty alright job as the Snowden avatar, showing his trials and tribulations leading up to the infamous US security leaks that helped at least partially expose the fuckeries being committed on American citizens in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. Plus, there’s Nicolas Fkn Cage! Sadly, this is too big of a story in a lot of ways. Even now, the implications are mind-blowing. Yet here it is.
Director Oliver Stone has made some interesting films over the years, pretty prolific if you look at his resume. Platoon kinda put him on the map with an anti-war kinda flick, pretty well done if my past DMR is any indication. He’s alternated a bit between “Hollywood Movies” and the, shall we say, “Explorative Fictions of History” since then. This falls in the latter. It’s based on real life events, at least. How accurate? It seems pretty spectacular, wholly unbelievable, completely fictitious. But. Is it? Reporter Glenn Greenwald is the main guy that helped break this story in real life, I am surprised he is not dead by now. And Glenn’s current reporting, while not quite as big of news as this, does still highlight some of the asstrocities happening in the world today. I want this to be fiction, because if it’s not, it doesn’t bode well for us overall. Some steps were taken to ‘remediate’ the surveillance state that this narrative covers. But given the last decade, I do not think much was done. Or at least it was just shifted to 3rd parties to avoid ‘accountability’ by our governments. But, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
