‘Snowden’ portrayal is almost as dull as ‘Sully’

You can tell we’re into the Fall movie season, what with back-to-back serious biopics hitting the big screen.

Last week, in “Sully,” Tom Hanks starred as pilot Chesley Sullenberger, an authentic American hero responsible for the “Miracle on the Hudson.”

And this week, we get “Snowden,” an Oliver Stone movie about NSA contractor Edward Snowden who leaked thousands of secret documents exposing our country’s surveillance systems.

A hero to some, a traitor to others, Snowden would seem to be a much richer and more complex character than a straight-arrow like Sully, but surprisingly, at least in this movie, he isn’t. In Oliver Stone’s eyes, and in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s portrayal, he’s every bit the true-blue hero Sully is. And almost as dull.

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Snowden is presented as an earnest, conservative young man who joins the Army in the wake of 9/11. When it becomes clear he’s not up to the physical rigors of boot camp, he’s redirected into the intelligence field, where his computer skills wow his superiors.

When Snowden completes an aptitude test in 38 minutes, instead of the average test time of five hours, he’s fast-tracked into the frontlines of CIA cyberwarfare. And what he learns there is eye-opening.

Snowden is so good at computer hacking that he keeps landing jobs deeper and deeper inside the NSA and the CIA. But the more he learns, the more disturbed he becomes. Convinced that our country’s 24/7 citizen surveillance is unconstitutional, he risks his career and his life to expose it.

At this point, the film adopts a kind of Jason Bourne plot — one man fighting his own government for the truth. But it’s missing something crucial. Not only the car chases but more importantly, the mystery to be solved. For most of us, we already know what Snowden uncovers, so there’s no thrill of discovery to be had.

Something we don’t already know, though, is anything about Snowden’s personal life, which is probably why almost half the film is devoted to his relationship with Lindsay Mills. Mills may be a fascinating person in her own right, but in this movie, she is reduced to the most generic girlfriend role imaginable. The two of them meet cute, they fall in love, they fight, they break up, they get back together, they fight, etc (You know the drill).

Snowden may be the whistleblower of the century but he still has the same old fights most guys have with their girlfriends. He ignores her, he doesn’t talk about his feelings, he cares more about his job than he does her. Shailene Woodley is a talented actress but she can’t do much with the little she’s given to play with.

So if the movie can’t surprise us with Snowden’s discoveries, since we already know them, and it can’t deep dive into his personal life, since there’s nothing much there, what else could it do?

How about giving us a better context for Snowden’s actions?
Snowden isn’t operating in a vacuum and yet you wouldn’t know it from this film. There’s never any political, philosophical, or even strategic pushback to what Snowden wants to do.

Snowden himself seems to have no reservations about what he’s doing, but then that could be chalked up to the zeal of a true believer. But surely he would at least be aware, and maybe even concerned, about the global fallout of his leaks, beyond his own personal danger. But Stone is so busy painting him as a hero that he fails to even acknowledge the possibility of dangerous ramifications of his actions.

“Snowden” would seem to offer Oliver Stone a great chance to seriously examine one of the most pressing issues of our time — the precarious role of individual liberties in the brave new world of cyber-surveillance. Instead, we get a standard issue biopic about a lone man fighting the system. Sure, it’s serviceable, but that’s about it.