Great job from Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Rating: 8/10 (4 December 2016)

It's tough to comment on a movie that is based on real events. If they change anything, they sold out to the dramatic sensationalist side, if they show it as it was, it is too boring.
As such, Snowden is a mediocre movie because it doesn't inflame me with rage on how much they changed the truth, nor does it disappoint me with just listing dull facts. But the movie is well done, well acted with a great performance from Gordon-Levitt and, more than anything, it tells the damn story. The story here is important.
First of all, it is always possible that people have not heard of or not understood the Snowden incident. It is important for them to hear and understand it. Then it is always possible that, having been informed, they choose to remain indifferent, on the basis that even with a whole world knowing what the secret services of the US are doing, nothing has changed. Those people are wrong. It was an unreasonable expectation for one man to change a half a trillion dollar industry by himself. However, it was never hoped that a man can make any difference against these kinds of odds and Snowden did so. We can discuss about this today, with facts not fantasies, because of what that man did.
When faced with seemingly overwhelming power, most people submit. They do so not because of the power itself, but its appearance, the perceived consequences of fighting it. Snowden showed that even the most powerful are not omnipotent or omniscient and that they still have to answer to all of us. As the carrier of this message, I applaud the movie.
Yet, as someone who knew of the real life events, I had only the dramatics of the film to entertain me and those, understandably so, were not many. You know what would really make my day, though? An aftermath movie. A Snowden sequel with everything (if anything) that has changed, watching the people in the middle of it, even if it is all dramatic fiction based on what we publicly know. Because right now the greatest enemy of people getting why this film was important is the bleak realization that essentially little has changed and they fail to grasp the importance of those little changes.