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Should You Be Stoked Or Bummed About Hollywood’s Snowden Movie?

Edward Snowden’s historical leak is about to get the Hollywood treatment.
Image: Open Road Films/YouTube

The first frame of the first trailer for Hollywood's movie about Edward Snowden and the story behind the historic leak of hundreds of top secret documents from the National Security Agency looks like it could've been lifted from a Matrix remake.

A car is speeding through an Hong Kong street. Then we see who's inside: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, looking all Neo-like with his pitch black outfit and sleek sunglasses. The rest of the trailer is what you'd expect from a Taken spin-off: car chases, melodramatic warnings—"They're gonna come for me! They're gonna come from all of you!"—and flat, predictable, characters (Snowden's girlfriend in particular looks like a caricature).

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Hey, maybe I'm being a party-pooper. After all, this Hollywood adaptation of Snowden's real story has Nicholas Cage in it, perhaps the most brilliant actor of our time, and is directed by a legit director like Oliver Stone. Motherboard's managing editor Adrianne Jeffries, for one, is "amped" by the trailer.

"This looks kinda good," she said in our Slack channel. "It's the opposite of [Academy Award winner] Citizenfour."

And you know what? Maybe that's OK. Now that we've already seen the wonderful all-truth and no-drama version of Snowden's story, we need to sprinkle Snowden's story with some car chases, cheesy hacker animations, and NSA documents hidden in Rubik's cubes.

"The world needs to remember," Adrianne added. "I'm so down for dramatizing this, and turning it into an action movie."

You know what? Maybe she has a point.