Snowden

Snowden tells the story of the events that led Edward Snowden to becoming one of the most wanted men in the world.

Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a computer expert who got his dream job with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). As a strong believer in his country it was the perfect job for him, helping to track the spies and terrorists that wish to cause damage to this country.

The film tracks his rise through the ranks of the intelligence community from his military service, his stationing in Geneva and Japan, then finally his employment with the NSA (National Security Agency) in Hawaii. Where they have a facility that is right out of any James Bond film.

At first he loves he job but then his conscience started bothering him when he discovers that besides spying on other countries and terrorist organizations around the world, the government also has a massive espionage network in place in the USA itself. In fact twice as much data is being taken from the USA as it is from Russia.

What's mind-blowing is the sheer scope of everything the surveillance program comprised. How the NSA can link up computer to computer and therefore person to person using all their available technological devices. If you believe it, and this film is telling you believe it, then it is chilling. So do what Snowden does and always put a sticking plaster over your laptop’s webcam when you’re having sex with your girlfriend.

 

His girlfriend is Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) and she is alongside him all the way, being shunted all around the world, yet she has little idea what he is up to most of the time and naturally he can’t tell her.

She stays impressively by his side throughout even he downloads evidence of the surveillance program and flies to Hong Kong with it. It is from a hotel there that much of the story is told in flashbacks as he reveals all to documentary filmmaker Laura Poitros (Melissa Leo) and journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) of The Guardian.

When they publish his revelations he has to go on the run and winds up at Moscow International Airport, where he becomes a fugitive charged under the Espionage Act for revealing classified information. The government and the media initially portrayed him as a spy but as everyone took in the information he had revealed public opinion generally swung behind him but the government’s stance remains the same and he remains in Russia, although not at the airport, to this day.

It’s a very well made film, informative and riveting which keeps you engaged and more importantly gets you thinking. It’s also well acted and well directed by Oliver Stone, a man well known for his critiques of the American government. Consequently the film perhaps does try a little too hard to paint Snowden as a hero but then, perhaps he was.

The Descendants

We have put this off and put this off because it's George and well, it can't possibly be any good, can it? Eventually we cracked. It's been nominated you know and so has George.

The Descendants is theoretically a film about a land deal because Matt King (George Clooney), a workaholic lawyer in Hawaii, is the sole trustee of a plot of land that has been in his family for ages. He and his cousins have to decide who to sell the untouched land to before the trust becomes dissolved in seven years time or they could of course do the unspeakable and leave it unspoilt.

You can probably guess how that turns out but it’s all a bit incidental really, the deal is just a side show in the film. The main plot centres around King’s thrill seeking wife (because he is so dull) who suffers a serious head injury in a powerboat accident. Now King not only has to deal with a wife in a coma but he’ll have to try to communicate with his daughters as well. Scary.

His youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller), has started to go off the rails and is acting up at school whilst Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) has been off them for some time, moving on to drugs and alcohol. King hops on a plane to bring her back from her boarding school, which is on a different island. Unfortunately, the best bit of the film, where he gets his drunken rambunctious eldest daughter on to the plane and then all the way home is cruelly edited out. All we see is him carrying her up the stairs to her bedroom. Cop out. That could have been good.

Then oddly from struggling as the self-confessed ‘backup parent’ remarkably, twenty minutes or so later, the entire family are getting along like a house on fire.

There are plenty of unbelievable moments like that but also some good bits too. There’s a strong scene where he has to tell Alexandra that her mother isn’t going to make it and according to her living will, they will have to take her off life support. Then Alexandra drops her own bombshell; that her mother was having an affair.

Faced with this knowledge, King does not go off the rails or go off to find the man to punch his lights out, as he would have done in many films. Instead we are asked to believe that yes King would want to track down his wife's lover but only to give the man a chance to say goodbye to his mistress. That may be sweet but it’s also slightly insane. At best, wouldn’t you send him an email?

So the whole family, along with Alexandra's annoying friend Sid (Nick Krause) who thinks her Grandma's Alzheimer's is hilarious, embark on one those road trips that America films are so fond of. Sid’s reason for being there is revealed towards the end, when you’re well sick of him, but even that’s an odd moment, where King seems lost for words or just lost and the moment is, well, lost.

Ultimately nothing really happens. When King finally confronts the man, again it’s all so, well nice. The whole film is like that, so lightweight, inconsequential. It’s another film where I was itching to amend the screenplay. In the end, little of it is really believable. Even his wife's eventual death isn't sad because at no point do we really see her alive nor are we given any indication that she could survive.

I can't help thinking that if someone like Mike Leigh had restaged this in some rundown housing estate in the UK with a bit of ‘kitchen sink realism’ we might have had something.

So is Clooney any good? Is he worthy of his many nominations? Not especially, he’s ok. Clooney does what Clooney does but he's been better.

It’s not a bad film, just nothing to get excited about. It’s got a sort of a RomCom feel to it; only without the Rom or the Com. I ought to say here that my partner loved it but for me... nah.