If you want a journalistic recounting of Edward Snowden's paradigm-altering PRISM leak, you should definitely check out last year's documentary, Citizenfour. If you want Oliver Stone's more, er, colorful version, here is a trailer for Snowden. Sound the Nic Cage siren!
It's always hard to dramatize what often amounts to a lot of very fast typing, and based on this brief look, Snowden hasn't discovered a non-awkward way to do so. And there's clearly a heaping helping of artistic license at play; as entertaining as the trailer's Rubik's Cube caper seems to be, Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, taking his voice down a register here) snuck his secrets out on a boring ol' thumb drive. Fortunately, the real story is packed with enough drama that Stone should have plenty of chances to hew close to it after all. Or this'll be a mess! Can't wait to find out which.
Pause at: 0:29 for fast typing; 0:46 for Nic Cage; 0:57 for a very Lawnmower Man take on internet visualization; 1:40 for a nice Rubik's Cube toss; 2:05 for what looks like a drone strike (???); back to 0:45 for Nic Cage.
Essential quote: "Think of it as a Google search, except instead of searching everything people make public, we're also looking at everything they don't." —Bad NSA Man.
