Movie Review: Snowden
Movie Review: Snowden
4 October 2016
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone's new film, Snowden.
RATING: M
RELEASE DATE: 22 September
When former CIA employee and government agency contractor Edward Snowden put tens of thousands of top-secret documents into the hands of the world’s media, he had this to say about his motives: “I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.”
The new Oliver Stone film Snowden, that chronicles the events that led up to his decision, will come as a revelation to many. The production not only conveys the shocking ways in which governments invade their citizens’ privacy, it also highlights our own complacency in standing up for the things we believe in.
Snowden introduces us to a young "Ed" who has been recruited by the CIA and is studying at the agency’s secret school for technology specialists. During that time, he meets his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who acts as the film’s human foil to his computational character. Snowden’s career in electronic intelligence is blossoming. He works for a slew of government services who shuffle him around the globe, allowing him to observe first-hand the increasing ability surveillance teams have to pry into personal lives. But it’s not until he is employed by the United States' National Security Agency that his disquiet begins to grow.
Stone shows us a man cracking under the weight of growing convictions. We watch as Snowden the patriot witnesses billions of private telephone records, texts and emails harvested and analysed, with only the slightest hint of judicial oversight. Webcams are turned on by remote to spy on unwitting allies; American "persons of interest" are routinely tracked by their mobile phones. Ed realises these actions are violating the very freedom they’re supposed to preserve. Yet he struggles to act on his conviction because it would mean losing his happiness with Lindsay.
Snowden’s eventual leaks of top-secret documents have been considered the act of a patriot by some, and a traitor by others. What interests me as a Christian, though, is the firm connection he establishes between his public and private lives. Eventually, Snowden realised that he couldn’t hold to the tenets of freedom in his heart and not allow it to effect his actions. Similarly, we all need to realise that the public-private distinction is a convenient myth. We are who our words and actions reveal us to be. Or, as Jesus puts it, “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45).
In Snowden, the hero realises that happiness can exist separate of our circumstances. Ed finds contentment even though the might of the US Government is turned against him and he may never see the shores of his homeland again. The key was unifying his heart with his hands: “As of today I am happy because I am no longer worried about tomorrow - because I am satisfied with what I did today.”
The real Snowden doesn’t consider himself a believer; at different times he’s claimed to be both Buddhist and Agnostic. Paradoxically, though, his approach to living a faithful life is one that a Christian can well adopt. Any faith we hold in Christ that does not travel as far as our words and actions because of the risks involved, is no faith at all.
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