Olga Kurylenko at the ‘Snowden’ Screening in London
Photo Credit: Pacific Coast News
Judging by how Edward Snowden already got his own Hollywood film, let’s see if this sparks a new round of high-profile government leaks. Joseph Gordon-Levitt scoring the lead role as Edward Snowden stars alongside Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, LaKeith Lee Stanfield, Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage. Wait a minute, Nicolas Cage is starring in this thing?! WTF? This can’t possibly be good—right?
Here’s more about the film:
The film follows Edward Snowden, an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency to The Guardian in June 2013. Among other things, the classified information revealed extensive illegal cyber-snooping on millions of unsuspecting American citizens which was unknown to even Congress at the time. Source
For those of you curious about critical response after it first screened at Comic-Con earlier this year:
Snowden received mixed reviews from critics, but praised Gordon-Levitt’s performance. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 63%, based on 175 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The site’s critical consensus reads, “Snowden boasts a thrilling fact-based tale and a solid lead performance from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but director Oliver Stone plays it perplexingly safe, sapping the story of its impact.”[42] On Metacritic, the film has a normalized rating of 58 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average “A” grade, on an A+ to F scale.
Richard Roeper gave the film three out of four stars, saying, “Snowden works best when it’s just Edward and the three journalists in that hotel room, sweating it out, or when we see the pattern of events that led him to commit acts that exposed the shocking practices of our own government but also quite possibly created serious security breaches.” [Source]
