The first major film event about Edward Snowden did not come this year thanks to Director Oliver Stone. Instead, it came in the form of Citizenfour, the deserving winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

That film is given a lot of attention in Stone's own creation, this week's Snowden, as many of its scenes include actor portrayals of Snowden, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and journalist Glenn Greenwald. The reenacted documentary scenes are quite authentic, complete with Snowden ducking under a blanket to enter a password while he's being filmed, and they were shot in the same Hong Kong hotel where Snowden was staying when the documents he copied were revealed to the world.

One documentary scene didn't make the dramatized cut, however. The first moment in which Snowden appears in the documentary includes Greenwald asking about the leaker's life and identity. To those, he almost immediately responded, "I'm not the story here."

That statement, which Stone didn't recreate, casts the eponymous film Snowden in a peculiar light—or, really, the idea of creating any eponymous piece of media about Edward Snowden. What he revealed in troves of data derived from the NSA and its contractors far eclipsed anything about how he accessed so much data, he might argue.

Yet in spite of obvious hitches and some blatant over-dramatization, this week's new Oliver Stone film—the first semi-fictional account about Snowden's life—stands out because it pulls off the "Snowden story" movie and clearly answers questions of why it should have been made.

An emotional core, a revelatory lead-actor performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and a surprisingly snappy treatment of various high-level technologies all feed into a true film surprise. The film won't add much information, insight, or color for anybody who has closely followed stories about the NSA's most famous whistleblower (though there is a little bit), but for those who have only peeked at the headlines, Snowden wonderfully sells the premise of why his disclosures mattered—and how the leaker himself is a meaningful part of the full story.

“You've come to the right whorehouse”









An opening text crawl explains that Snowden is absolutely, positively "a dramatization of actual events," but honestly, the movie doesn't need such text, as it beats that fact over your head within about 15 minutes—in the form of Nicholas Cage, no less.

We meet Cage, who plays one of Snowden's eventual CIA instructors, after Snowden's origin story begins to play out. While the opening scene recreates Snowden's 2013 meeting with Greenwald and Poitras, the film quickly shifts gears to Snowden in 2004, when his attempt to join the Army was allegedly cut short by breaking both of his legs during basic training (a fact he appears to have mentioned at Ars Technica's own forums, where he was a longtime member; and if you're wondering, yes, his Ars handle appears in the film a few times).

After an administrative discharge, Snowden is told by a doctor that "there are other ways to serve your country," and he dives into a barrage of interviews with the CIA, where he describes a few generations of family members in public service, including a grandfather in the FBI and a father in the Coast Guard. The most important day of his life was 9/11, he said, and yes, America is the greatest country in the world.

The interview pans out—though it has been conducted by a major CIA official with the obviously fictitious name of Corbin O'Brien, shoutout to all you Orwellian fanboys and fangirls out there—and Snowden finds himself at a CIA training facility known as The Hill in 2006. There, he meets Cage's jaded character of Hank Forrester, who geeks out with Snowden about code-cracking hardware like the Cray-1 before rattling off stories about highly classified projects over plumes of cigarette smoke. He's telling all of this to Snowden only months into the young man's CIA studies, but, you know, what better time to swap incredibly sensitive spy-ops stories?

"What is your sin of choice?" Forrester asks Snowden. The answer is "computers," to which Forrester remarks, "You've come to the right whorehouse."

Forrester eventually complains about having built a data-crawling system that was designed to target known enemies of the state, but the project was eventually handed off to a $4 billion contractor. "No filters, no automation," Forrester complains. "They were drowning in data."

All the while, the film's dramatic table is being set: O'Brien tells CIA trainees that "SQL injections and malware are the real threats," that "journalists neglect to tell the whole truth," and that "the modern battlefield is everywhere" (he says the last line while patting a computer monitor). Snowden tears through a major "destroy a network and bring it back online" training exercise faster than anyone else in his class in a scene that parrots pretty much every other "young gun astounds his professors" scene in modern filmmaking. All the while, Snowden begins a relationship with Lindsay Mills (played by Shailene Woodley), a tech-savvy photographer who sees through the lies he tells to cover up his actual work associated with the CIA.

The rest of the film hits the highlights of Snowden's known story, including his stints for both the CIA and for NSA contractors in Geneva, Japan, Maryland, and Hawaii, along with occasional story-punctuation points back in Hong Kong as Greenwald urges editors at The Guardian to publish Snowden's findings before White House officials can squash or contain them. These Hong Kong moments are pretty toothless, assumedly because Stone is careful not to recreate anything substantial that Poitras already filmed; instead, these are mostly "off the record" moments that use idle banter to connect us back to the main, history-telling story.

Snowden doesn't have a lot of consistent characters, beyond Woodley as the girlfriend who follows Snowden across the globe, and the rest of the cast feels forgettable as a result. Stone places some characters in the film as obvious pushers of evil, including a diabolical hipster-hacker named Gabriel (ugh, these fictitious names) who introduces Snowden to the NSA systems that peered into millions of cell phone calls, texts, instant messages, and webcam feeds. The character shows up as a fully formed delinquent, laughing off Snowden's shock about these systems, and his presence doesn't really seem necessary to drive the point home about why such a surveillance infrastructure might have alarmed our main character.

None of the film's evil-with-no-reason characters are more obnoxious than the central "villain" of O'Brien, whose internal logic makes little sense. In multiple parts of the film, he juggles the simultaneous ideals of protecting the country at all costs while making a man's own job security priority number one. While O'Brien appears throughout the entire film's runtime, Stone doesn't dedicate enough time to paint that character's possible shades of duty-driven gray—though, with a name like that, do you really expect any?

Easy call for Best Actor nominee, at the very least

So what saves so many bad-sounding elements? Honestly, Gordon-Levitt, who is reportedly donating his salary from Snowden to the ACLU.

The actor never slams a desk, screams at a colleague, or bursts into high-horse soliloquy. He never starts pouting about an American dream or explains to viewers how the system dragged him down. Gordon-Levitt instead communicates Snowden's fractured faith through tone, uneasy glances, and painful conversations with his longtime girlfriend, whom he leaves in the dark about nearly every single project he works on or leads while connected to the US Government.

It's hard to point to a giant moment in which Gordon-Levitt shows himself as best-actor material, but one scene does a pretty good job. Snowden and his contractor coworkers huddle around a campfire, with one of them talking coldly about the craziness of modern combat—of finding enemies in a new, Internet-connected world—and then tries to explain away his and other coworkers' faults in any possible wrongdoing. Snowden sits quietly, taking the (admittedly awful) speech in. He breathes, waits for his beat, and begins calmly reminding the group about the Nuremberg trials after World War II, listing off the chain of arrests that followed the highest-up arrests. "Ordinary jobs become criminal," Snowden says without raising his voice or making a scene. "I'm just saying," he adds—but, the way this delivery comes off, he's more than just saying it.

You may leave the theater not feeling particularly astounded by Gordon-Levitt's performance, but his stoicism and faithfulness to the way Snowden spoke and behaved in Citizenfour (and other public appearances) deserves the highest of praise—especially since Gordon-Levitt still finds moments to flash levity, smiles, and genuine emotion without betraying his subject's personality. He may be portraying a dry person, but he does not do so dryly. (In the scope of this film, his girlfriend's character is given the unfortunate duty of existing solely to further Snowden's plot and react to his situations, but Woodley does her best to assert individuality in the character and play out intense, emotional scenes in believable ways.)

Beyond that, Snowden wins out by finding the right moments to talk about and portray technology without weighing the film down. You won't find any faked-up, cheesy-looking GUIs on the myriad terminals scattered across the film's many nations, but you will see Snowden pounding away on telnet interfaces while peppering conversations with technical terms only when they're really necessary. We're never hearing him, argue about ideal internal network protocols or complain about debugging code, for example. Stone knows that computer-loaded imagery can look boring, but he does his best to use wild lighting to make server stacks look kind of awesome, and he employs not-too-flamboyant CGI to show viewers ways in which millions of Internet users can be connected to each other for the purposes of surveillance without realizing it.

(By the way, the only time a government computer system in the film uses a truly graphical UI comes when we see a Snowden-coded system called Heartbeat, which displays map data in something that looks like a rudimentary, Windows 3.1 application. Since we're talking about military-developed apps, that visual treatment seems wholly appropriate.)

Stone has a lot of ground to cover, in terms of what kind of access the NSA enjoyed at the height of its wiretapping program. He focuses his explanation efforts on a Geneva incident that Snowden once publicly complained about, in which CIA agents purposefully got a banker drunk and put him into a car-wreck scenario to blackmail him. Stone dramatizes this by adding another wrinkle to the story—by faking as if Snowden and friends had actually used the NSA's wiretapping powers to spy on this banker's daughter along with any friends she was connected to digitally; they then use that information to ruin her life. The film twists the scenario accordingly: the banker was so distraught by what happened to his daughter, he got drunk.

This version may be a slightly distasteful bending of the truth—unless it turns out to be true, though Snowden has never publicly hinted at such a twist—but honestly, for the sake of moving the plot along and nailing the storytelling balance of what power the NSA had and how it was applied, it works. Messages, webcam hijacking, and metadata triangulation from one person to the next: this sequence neatly shows clueless viewers how easily a no-way-I'm-a-terrorist kind of person could get caught up in the web of so much data accumulation.

Duty and country above all?

Throughout the film, Snowden continues to apply his computer prowess to government infosec, and we see him shift from position to position, where he tries to distance himself from programs he disagrees with. Stone pounds home the fact that Snowden is an apparent lifelong Republican, a believer in a strong military, and a man who acts in accordance with the ideals of duty and service. When the NSA's prying eyes loom ever larger, for example, he shifts gears to work on a giant data backup service that connects all government computer systems in both more efficient and safer ways. According to the film, however, that system was eventually weaponized and used in ways he didn't predict, expect, or want.

By the end of Snowden, no matter how dramatized the film looks at times, enough of the timeline is made up of facts and real moments for viewers to come out of the film believing in the story that Stone is clearly trying to sell: that Snowden is "an American" in terms of fulfilling the stereotypes of putting duty and country above all else, including things like his relationships, his health, and sometimes, even his principles.

Unfortunately, Stone seems dead set on punching a giant hole in an otherwise sturdy ship with so much on-the-nose content: a later-film conversation in which a CIA director's giant, evil head appears on a full-wall projection screen; a toy drone hovering over a bonfire party that eventually crashes during the scene's emotional beat; an unnecessarily tawdry sex scene that seems inserted just so the Snowden character can stare in terror at a webcam lens looking right back at his naked body; gosh, even the very moment Snowden exports crucial data, when Stone tries to up the stakes by having a micro-SD card, which was inserted into Snowden's discrete keyboard-SD slot, spring out violently and nearly have him get caught copying files.

Gordon-Levitt keeps his head low and his acting chops high to anchor the film, however, and he deserves the lion's share of credit for doing right by what we publicly know about Snowden. Apparently, the real-life Snowden agrees, as he has spent the past few days retweeting tidbits about accurate scenes in the film—and in fact, he argues that the film confirms inaccuracies in the House Intelligence Committee's report on Snowden's disclosures , which conveniently came out one day before the film did.

In the coming weeks, we may very well see Snowden use Twitter to say more about how the movie does or does not reflect his take on what happened between 2004 and 2013. But outside of that, the film must stand on its own, and in that regard, Stone has done enough—if barely—to find his own path back into making relevant films about war, the industrial-military complex, and the changing battlegrounds wars are waged on.

Listing image by Open Road Films