Mass Surveillance Part 2: Snowden (2016)

Film Review for Snowden (2016)
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Written by: Oliver Stone, Kieran Fitzgerald
Based on the book by: Anatoly Kucherena, Luke Harding
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Rhys Ifans, and others

Review

You know the story of Edward Snowden, and Oliver Stone's film, much like his previous political films, sets to tell the human story of someone at the center of conspiracy. In this case, Edward Snowden a young man who injures himself in the armed service grows to serve his country in other ways. He is a computer science genius, shown to us in the typical "smartest guy in the room" type of incredulous test-study thing, before becoming a major worker in the CIA. It's during his time that he comes into contact with the NSAs surveillance network and his paranoia grows until he decides to whistleblow.

Considering that Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and what he divulged happened in the real world we are mostly familiar with this story. Citizenfour, the documentary whose real filming is dramatized in this film, was released about a year after Snowden's leak, the reputation of which had garnered a serious reputation as a blow against America. Declared an act of treason, the most important weight to drag to this film is the idea that Snowden somehow wronged us.

The film itself is surprisingly "meh."

Let's be clear, the character of Edward Snowden is not interesting, not in real life, not in the film. He was a worker, he got scared of his work, and he smuggled and whistleblew. That's literally the story, to the point that when he first came out many media outlets and the government did their best to try and redact his claims, to say he was just a disgruntled office worker who was mad about a relocation. There's an untouched arc that could've worked, where Snowden transitions from being a soldier to being a treasounous whistleblower, but for some reason the film refuses to ever tap into this. The Snowden from the very first conversation with his love interest is the exact same person at the end of the film.

Shailene Woodley has piss-all to do in this film besides look and act like Shailene Woodley. Has anyone even interviewed Snowden's wife/girlfriend person? You can't tell in this film, as she literally falls out of the sky as cool girl to have sex with, even when she's mad there's still some sexy things you can do with and for her. I've never seen so much screentime so grossly misused as with the romantic partnership between these two.

Let me be clear: I do not find the fear and paranoia of Mass Surveillance in and of itself interesting. It has to be made interesting for me. What I'm not interested in is Joseph-Gordon Levitt staring at his webcam. That's not interesting, especially when the only shot in the film dedicated to making that scary is a single shot of a woman who only goes to her undies. Invasive? Yes! Frightening? Paranoid? Thrilling? No. The opening shot of Carrie physically represents a far more uncomfortable reality of the relationship with nude vulnerability and viewership.

At least Orwell understood that rummaging through self-reported facts can create an entirely fictional criminal. That was sort of scary. But Snowden fails to think beyond some strange moral line. It seems to insist, "The government shouldn't be able to do this," and that in and of itself is only scary to a particular type of jingoistic gun toting paranoid that I'm not.

Snowden for some reason fails to comprehend what subject its even talking about. Nearly everything in the film, down to the basic paranoia that we established must be there in this genre, is missing. Instead we get a very boring slow portrait of a very boring man. And it did not have to be this way.

I think of Fruitvale Station, certainly a much more emotional powerhouse film, but a biographical film about a man unjustifiably shot at a train station while handcuffed. It's important to realize that the action of being killed is not what is focused on in that film. Instead, it takes a tour of what a young black man's life might look like, where he might have gone wrong, where he might have gone right. Then they kill him. And that's it. That's the point.

There is nothing interesting in the continued discussion this film has about Edward Snowden. Yes, what he did was great. No, nothing anyone has done before will be as important for the transperancy of the country. But there's a character there, a story, and a biography, not just of one man but of everybody, and when it's painted with this bland a brush for the characters, it serves absolutely no justice to the real people in America who may begin to feel threatened by this type of thing.

Art is an argument, a political stance, and the one in Snowden is so laughably weak that the concept of being "scared" only exists in the next project Stone decides to direct.

-----

Did you like this post? If so, consider signing up for the e-mail list so you never miss out on the latest film, tv, music, or video game post from Expository Conundrum! (Hint: It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page!!)

Also, consider donating to the blog! Your eyes are enough, but generosity and support can go a long way to making us both feel a lot better. Support your local artist (by local I mean Internet local.)

And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

-----
I didn't like Snowden, and when I don't like something, I'm not going to recommend it to you either. Instead, if you like conspiracies and/or Oliver Stone, make sure you've seen his career making masterpiece, JFK. It's longer than Snowden, but definitely better.

Mass Surveillance Part 1: Orwell (2016)

Review of Orwell
Developed by Osmotic Studios
Published by Surprise Attack Games
Review Copy Purchased

Review

Orwell (2016) places you in the role of a surveillance operator of the latest technology developed by The Nation, Orwell. Part Person of Interest machine and part database, Orwell processes datachunks being collected about specific people based on what you, the operator, upload. Orwell presents you with articles, social media feeds, phone calls, instant messages, and laptops or phones of the people you are surveilling. For the player, this manifests as a series of click and drag operations between windows on the screen.

The story of Orwell revolves around an explosion at Freedom Plaza in the incredibly non-specific fictional city of Bonton. You are guided by an adviser who comments on the datachunks and guides you towards the information you need to find so that they can contact authorities with the information. The bombings appear to be tied to a group known as Thought. Thought as it turns out is a rebellious group of students led by their history teacher, who slowly become more and more radicalized as the game's story unfolds.

Orwell as a Mass Surveillance game does a great job of having you scare yourself. Within the first chapter of the game, you go from a simple news article to listening to someone's private calls. Orwell as a system of infiltration and surveillance is based on real world spying technology and this is the most powerful portrait it paints. Especially due to the nature of the system, Orwell seems to pinpoint only the aspects of a person that it needs in order to incriminate them. You get to see other aspects of their lives, even aspects you can point out and upload, from simple information such as favorite colors to people they've slept with or their sexual orientation.

Sometimes you have to make a choice between information that is contradictory to other information. These essentially act as the game's decision-making points. Are you going to report that this character is married, or gay? This has small changes on how the story unfolds and in some missions can seem to change the outcome.

You breach the privacy of lives more than a hundred times before the game ends, and it's that simplicity that is frightening.

Or at least its meant to be.

At this point, we have to go ahead and get into spoilers, and we'll switch from review mode to analysis mode. If what I've said intrigues you, and you have fifteen bucks and five hours to spare, check out Orwell it's a pretty good little game.

All right, just to make sure.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Everyone gone? Okay.

So Orwell begins with a great enough premise. As you research Thought more and more as an activist group, you begin to build a nice web of people all linked to each other. And as I played Orwell I anticipated this to be the first in a nice long web, the size of which I was expecting to be massive by the end of the game.

Instead, hours later, I was somewhat disappointed. While the cast had grown from the one person of the first episode, the last episode really only plays between about seven or eight characters total. They're all linked by being in Thought, but that's it. And only one of them has really been orchestrating terrorist attacks, and when you understand the reason the game leaves you, the operator, with the choice of what to expose to the public.

I understand why they went in this direction. The concept of creating stories and facts and details around one hundred characters and making the gameplay and story interesting is an incredibly difficult challenge. But that's exactly what I wanted. Instead, it felt like Orwell's world was incredibly small. All over there were background details about corporate sponsors, foreign wars, peace talks, and the potential for big large movement activism or terrorist organizations and almost none of that is delivered on.

Even the final mission, a ticking clock wherein you can only report so much information to Orwell before the final decision comes to light, operates almost as a red herring mission. You will still learn who the big bad guy is, and I imagine that you still get the choice as to what ending you will get. This was disappointing in a game that had seemed full of branches before hand.

There are some serious problems with the specific details of this choice you make to. The idea is that you can choose to whistleblow, report Thought as terrorists, or expose that they've been spying on you, an out of country citizen. This somehow blows up in the end as either a good, bad, or neutral ending, all of which end with you sliding one last datachunk over to Orwell to end the game.

The worst part of all these problems is that the information you upload, and the people you're spying on, are absolutely suspicious and all potentially capable of being the major bad guy you're looking for the entire game. All of it is information that would be difficult to capture otherwise, and so, even with all the "breaches" of privacy (some of which include people handing out the equivalent of their IP addresses in chatboxes) are hand given to you as a means of looking through. Who on earth is uploading their plan to blow a place up on social media? (Okay a lot of people, isn't it good that they can be caught?)

This small scope, and actions that seem to be there only for the sake of easily moving through the story, really cuts into the message of Orwell. I would've been aghast at a huge scope of a hundred people very quickly reported on. I would've been shocked by personal violations such as publicly exposing someone as a depressive and making them lose their job, or by calling a married person gay with "evidence" pulled from alternative social profiles. I would have been mortified by the concept of inventing evidence based on nothing, but none of these things happen in Orwell.

You stalk eight people who openly brag and speak against the government that has recently cracked down on people speaking against the government, who are all directly connected, related, or involved with an actual terrorist mastermind for the entire game. There's nothing shocking about that! It sounds like an argument for the very system you're arguing against!

But that doesn't mean its all bad.

As I said before, the act of reporting information to Orwell allows you to grasp how databases work, and the choices point out how databases can be abused.

The art style of Orwell is stunning. Fractal geometric shapes are used for everything. The background, people's faces, real world settings. It impresses on you the idea of a world that is cut and dry, where the shapes and plans and the actions all fit together perfectly. There is no need to second guess. You can see the shadows on their smug faces.

And at the very least the story functions as a very good mystery story, the likes of which will keep you interested and guessing in your play time. It's just that, for this genre, which we established really needs to strike the fear into the heart of a normal citizen, it just didn't do it for me. I didn't came out scared of a system like Orwell as much as I felt the game had justified the very existence of a system like it.

-----

This was the first part of a two part series. Previously an introduction discussing real world Surveillance and George Orwell was posted as an introduction. The next part will concern Oliver Stone's latest thriller, Snowden. Let's just say, this genre doesn't seem to be getting very far off the ground with me. Until then,

Did you like this post? If so, consider signing up for the e-mail list so you never miss out on the latest film, tv, music, or video game post from Expository Conundrum! (Hint: It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page!!)

Also, consider donating to the blog! Your eyes are enough, but generosity and support can go a long way to making us both feel a lot better. Support your local artist (by local I mean Internet local.)

And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

Mass Surveillance Part 0: My Thoughts

Mass Surveillance has been a fear of the public conscience ever since George Orwell's novel 1984 (1949). Big Brother is the name of the entity that constantly watches the public and populace through what was essentially a computer screen in every citizen's home and in the stores and on the streets. There was virtually nowhere the characters could go to achieve any sense of privacy, and even worse, they'd grown used to it.

Prior to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing of the NSAs global surveillance programs, there were many people who had a finger pointed the Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism incentive that allowed law enforcement agencies to acquire, act, and prevent planned attacks, as the primary force of Orwellian politics in modern America. Even being a younger teenager at the time, I remember every time something along the lines of mass surveillance came up, "Orwellian" was always the functional adjective of the sentence.

While some might look at 1984 and see the nightmare of totalitarian government, it does feel like people take the most visible level of what was happening in that novel and use it to paint certain real world things as much worse than they seem. It's important to remember that the citizens in Orwell's novel weren't protected from government criticism, whereas in a country like America freedom of speech is protected. I've said a lot about the most recent election outcome in this country - as have a lot of others - and nothing is happening to us, and there's very little reason to think anything will happen to us. That's because of the protections American Democracy affords to its citizens and is one of the biggest benefits of that system.

In short, the horror of Orwell's world is not the horror of this country.

Let's get American, y'all.

Even in a post-Snowden world, I'm not all that scared or surprised that the government uses technology to spy on its citizens. I'm not surprised it uses it to keep an eye on potential dangers. What I don't see is any violation of the Bill of Rights in the country being done. If you are skeevy about web cameras, cover them. If you are worried about being spied on, don't use Facebook. There's a lot of things you can opt out of to keep your privacy, but there's no privacy on the internet and based on the huge amount of racist, threatening things that happen there, that's kind of a good thing.

I'm glad Snowden did what he did, but he really only allowed us to stop guessing at something that's been possible since nine years prior to his whistleblowing. And until something more substantial happens ...

... that's basically all she wrote about the situation. It's fear and paranoia and a huge self-importance that people place on themselves to think they'll be stolen away unknowingly into the night.

----

So what are we looking for when it comes to the Mass Surveillance genre? Well, let's get what Orwell did when he wrote 1984. There is a genuine fear that people had of that world. There's a reason the word "Orwellian" stuck and get's brought up. Hell, one of the things that will be reviewed in the next post is a game literally named after the man himself.

So in short, the Mass Surveillance genre is conspiracy thriller mixed with government horror. There's something unthrilling about the very real possibility of existing without privacy. There's something very horrifying about not being safe inside your own home or your own country.

Part of the reason I wrote the first part of this post was so we could lay this out. The goal of a genre is to allow a range of emotion or a feeling painted with specific aspects. Mass Surveillance as a topic should absolutely be involved in the political conversation surrounding that topic, and ideally, if the goal is to say Mass Surveillance is a bad thing, then I should be horrified.

So with that in mind, part two of Mass Surveillance will be a review of the point-drag-and click adventure thriller, Orwell (2016).

-----

Did you like this post? If so, consider signing up for the e-mail list so you never miss out on the latest film, tv, music, or video game post from Expository Conundrum! (Hint: It's in the upper right-hand corner of the page!!)

Also, consider donating to the blog! Your eyes are enough, but generosity and support can go a long way to making us both feel a lot better. Support your local artist (by local I mean Internet local.)

And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

-----