This film could have been riveting, should have at least been interesting, but was absolutely boring. The positive reviews that I have seen seem to be reviewing the story behind this film and not the film itself. I can sum up this film in ten words: Two hours of a guy sitting in a hotel room. In reality, it was only roughly 75% Snowden in a hotel room, but the other 25% of the film was just as boring.
This film could have achieved its potential by providing some interpretation of the information it was providing. Snowden say's a lot of technical things about computers and information that the film just leaves hanging in the air.
I don't think that this film can be spoiled, as it was awful, but I don't want to get blacklisted, so the following paragraphs MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.
There was one scene during one of the early meetings between Snowden and Greenwald in which Snowden felt compelled to put a towel over his head and his laptop while he was doing something on the laptop. It was unclear why he was doing this and from whom he was trying to shield the information. I don't see why he would be shielding what he was doing from the people in the room, and I don't see how this measure would safeguard him from anybody outside the room. Some form of explanation might have been useful. This scene just made Snowden look like a paranoid crank who might just as well have been wearing a tinfoil hat.
A later scene showed some vertical video (Side-rant: video is a horizontal medium people; please stop shooting phone videos vertically), presumably shot with a phone, that depicted some guys in a workshop. One clip is of a guy using a drill on something, and the other is of a guy using a grinder on something. What were these guys tooling on? What was the significance?
Later in the film, Greenwald addresses some Brazilian politicians in Portuguese. This was one of the few explanatory bits in the film, and it's in a foreign language with subtitles. There was no cinematic value to letting the whole thing play in Portuguese. A few seconds of that situation would have established that he had addresses the Portuguese politicians, then it would have been better for clarity and impact to have him say it in English later.
Then there was the big pay-off! A scene of Snowden and Greenwald sitting in a room together with Greenwald speaking introductory phrases punctuated by the visual comma of him leaning over a table and scribbling the rest of his sentence on a piece of paper, which he hands to Snowden who reads it in astonishment. What do these notes say? They show one of them, which says that 1,200,000 people are under surveillance by the NSA, which Snowden reads in astonishment. Isn't that what the whole film has been telling us? That the NSA is spying on American Citizens.
My first reaction to this big payoff was, "The NSA is only spying on 1.2 million of the 300+ million living in America?" And that is a prime example of why this film is a huge failure: It misses every opportunity to have an impact. The big revelation is not that the NSA is only spying on 1.2 million people. The NSA is collecting information about all of us, and that is bad enough. However, the NSA is ACTIVELY SURVEILLING 1.2 million people. That's the big revelation.
This film could have achieved its potential by providing some interpretation of the information it was providing. Snowden say's a lot of technical things about computers and information that the film just leaves hanging in the air.
I don't think that this film can be spoiled, as it was awful, but I don't want to get blacklisted, so the following paragraphs MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.
There was one scene during one of the early meetings between Snowden and Greenwald in which Snowden felt compelled to put a towel over his head and his laptop while he was doing something on the laptop. It was unclear why he was doing this and from whom he was trying to shield the information. I don't see why he would be shielding what he was doing from the people in the room, and I don't see how this measure would safeguard him from anybody outside the room. Some form of explanation might have been useful. This scene just made Snowden look like a paranoid crank who might just as well have been wearing a tinfoil hat.
A later scene showed some vertical video (Side-rant: video is a horizontal medium people; please stop shooting phone videos vertically), presumably shot with a phone, that depicted some guys in a workshop. One clip is of a guy using a drill on something, and the other is of a guy using a grinder on something. What were these guys tooling on? What was the significance?
Later in the film, Greenwald addresses some Brazilian politicians in Portuguese. This was one of the few explanatory bits in the film, and it's in a foreign language with subtitles. There was no cinematic value to letting the whole thing play in Portuguese. A few seconds of that situation would have established that he had addresses the Portuguese politicians, then it would have been better for clarity and impact to have him say it in English later.
Then there was the big pay-off! A scene of Snowden and Greenwald sitting in a room together with Greenwald speaking introductory phrases punctuated by the visual comma of him leaning over a table and scribbling the rest of his sentence on a piece of paper, which he hands to Snowden who reads it in astonishment. What do these notes say? They show one of them, which says that 1,200,000 people are under surveillance by the NSA, which Snowden reads in astonishment. Isn't that what the whole film has been telling us? That the NSA is spying on American Citizens.
My first reaction to this big payoff was, "The NSA is only spying on 1.2 million of the 300+ million living in America?" And that is a prime example of why this film is a huge failure: It misses every opportunity to have an impact. The big revelation is not that the NSA is only spying on 1.2 million people. The NSA is collecting information about all of us, and that is bad enough. However, the NSA is ACTIVELY SURVEILLING 1.2 million people. That's the big revelation.