Serves well as a conduit to make you think...

Rating: 7/10 (8 May 2020)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role, is recruited to work for the CIA and soon realises that there are plenty of "Un-American" activities going on that he decides to leak to the press. The "Wikileaks" story is amongst the best publicised in recent years so there is little latitude the film can take with the chronology or facts. What it does do, though, is create a character in Snowden that is both torn and decent; not just with the responsibilities he faces at work, but with the impact on his family and long-time girlfriend (here, a rather better than usual Shailene Woodley) when he decides to spill the beans. That said, JGL really has to hold this up by himself - Zachary Quinto is terrible and neither Nicholas Cage nor Rhys Ifans add much beyond their names to the depth of the story. Clearly, much of this is supposition but it is certainly a thought-provoking attempt to question what we might do with information that is quite so condemnatory of our own "free" governments, if it were to come into our possession; or, indeed - should we ever become faced with the evidence of the comprehensive extent of the monitoring sub-culture that this film suggests may well exist across all of our communities.