Watching the Watchers

Rating: 7/10 (19 April 2017)

I don't know if I have enough thoughts on this yet for a full review - I know I liked it, maybe some of Snowden's personality himself rubbed off on me the wrong way at times (as with other stories of high-strung whistleblowers like Serpico and The Insider seeing the interactions the protagonists have with the women in their lives is hard to watch ... I should also note Woodsley was highly underrated in this, as was probably Gordon Levitt, but somehow I keep thinking about her and how, for one of the handful of times in Stone's career, Heaven & Earth included, he has a solid three-dimensional female character to work with, but I digress).
But it features a solid script that doesn't necessarily have that feverish energy of the 80's/90's Stone movies - though, with age, Stone also therefore has appeal, one can hope if his name isn't too attached to those iconoclast cherry bombs, to middle America and people who want to see a simple good thriller, and this serves that purpose. It also has some of the strongest visual ideas Stone has had in a long time, maybe since Alexander or longer; the highlight of the film (aside from Nicolas Cage's precious minutes) is when Snowden faces his boss/mentor played by Rhys Ifans when he is in trouble, in a conference room, as the man's face is on a giant screen, seemingly 3 times Snowden's full size (but it seems to loom larger). That's the tense-as-s**t Stone I've been missing, and it's all done in shot-reverse-shot and largely dependent on the size of characters in the frame (in a sense it's sort of like the reverse of that scene in Network between Beatty and Finch).
Maybe another viewing will change my mind, though it's hard to shake the fact that we already have CITIZENFOUR in this world, and that's kind of enough. So it's a good Stone film, it truly is, but it's missing that *something* that I can't describe just yet from his work in the 90's.