A couple of years ago, the documentary CitizenFour won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The film was directed by Laura Poitras, who has become a character in Oliver Stone’s dramatic narrative version of the same story, SNOWDEN.

Poitras is played by Melissa Leo who is flanked by Tom Wilkinson as journalist Ewen MacAskill and Zachary Quinto as reporter Glenn Greenwald, the trusted trio NSA whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, flies to Hong Kong to meet to spew his secrets concerning U.S. Government cyber surveillance programs of seismic proportions.

A top security contractor with virtuoso programming skills, Snowden has discovered that a virtual Everest of information is being assembled tracking all forms of digital communication — not just from foreign governments and terror groups, but from ordinary Americans. Disillusioned with his work in the intelligence community, Snowden meticulously gathers hundreds of thousands of secret documents that will expose the full extent of the surveillance and the mountain of meta data.

Directed by Oliver Stone, SNOWDEN is the sprawling, snowballing conspiracy story he’s noted for, crammed with cute cameos (Nicolas Cage in his best work in a while) and a stellar impersonation of the real man by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

SNOWDEN is certainly more popcorn entertaining than CitizenFour, but there’s not really any new doors that are opened in the story of Edward Snowden, a conservative young patriot eager to serve his country who transforms into a historic whistle-blower. Nor does it pose any really provocative questions about which liberties we are willing to give up in order for our government to protect us.

There is a delightful hiss the villain bravura performance by Rhys Iffans as a spook scout CIA maven and the picture looks great thanks to Slumdog Millionaire‘s Oscar winning cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle.

Cynically, so what if the government is spying on us? Seems people are willing to pervert their own privacy themselves, with postings on Facebook and other social/anti-social media. Between selfies and the census, Big Brother has you stitched, so Snowden, schmoden, get back to your modem and disseminate without discriminate. It seems that the citizenry is more concerned about outside invasion than the invasion of privacy.

#Watch yourself. Of course.