Snowden
Oliver Stone's dramatization of Edward Snowden's path from CIA contractor to NSA whistleblower, paired companion to Citizenfour from the dramatic-fiction side.
- Directors
- Oliver Stone
- Released
- 2016
- Writers
- Oliver Stone, Kieran Fitzgerald
- Runtime
- 134 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Audiences who want a narrative dramatization with character backstory, the Lindsay Mills relationship, and a more conventional thriller arc. Useful as the "Hollywood version" companion to Citizenfour for skeptical or non-technical viewers.
Skip this if
Anyone who has already watched Citizenfour. The film duplicates that material with fewer of its strengths (real footage, real stakes) and more melodrama, including a literal Rubik's Cube as plot device.
Key takeaways
- The dramatization adds nothing factual; it adds character motive, which matters for general audiences and not at all for practitioners.
- Stone is a polemic filmmaker, and the film leans hard into a particular reading of the disclosures, take it as an argument, not a record.
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt's voice work is the most committed thing in the film; treat it as a strong performance grafted onto an unnecessary movie.
Notes
Adapted from Anatoly Kucherena's Time of the Octopus and Luke Harding's The Snowden Files. If you only have time for one Snowden film, pick Citizenfour. If you have time for two, watch this one second to see how the same material plays as fiction. Pair the policy backdrop with This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends and with the relevant chapters of Dark Territory.