Edward Snowden Reacts To ‘Snowden’ Movie Trailer, Presumably Winces At Sex Scene With Rest Of Us

The first trailer for Snowden is here and it looks like a deliriously mangled hybrid of The Fifth Estate and Blackhat. The trailer hits every troubled genius / agonized truth-teller / computer hacker cliché imaginable. Still, the trailer is a strange, disorienting delight for close followers of the news, who, in less than three minutes, get to experience Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Edward Snowden voice and the oddly apt casting of Zachary Quinto as The Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald (who was writing for The Guardian at the time of the Snowden leaks).

Here it is, the first trailer for Oliver Stone’s Snowden:

In addition to the tragically noble attempts to ape Snowden’s flat, pedagogical speech patterns, Snowden looks larded with the worst kind of kinetic hacker nonsense. Where The Social Network and Silicon Valley have shown that it’s best to focus on the characters interfacing with the computers, filmmakers like Oliver Stone and Michael Mann can’t seem to let go of the already-dated graphical interfaces and zipping, glowing wires used to metaphorically visualize hacker space. It didn’t work in Hackers or Lawnmower Man and it doesn’t work now.

Snowden even apes the most disastrous scene from Spielberg’s otherwise masterful Munich, giving us a Snowden so troubled and distracted by surveillance that it ruins sex for him.

Snowden will be in theaters on Sept. 16, though the world would be better served if its marketing and release budget was spent promoting Citizenfour, the Laura Poitras documentary about Snowden’s whistleblowing that captures the very real suspense of an international espionage incident.