A common movie theme, particularly in the United States, portrays an individual or a small, ragtag group of rebels battling for justice against the oppression of government and big business.
The underdog conflict never bores audiences nor has there ever been a shortage of directors and stars to tell those tales. The only thing that changes is the methodology, which is why Star Wars and Harry Potter, Spotlight and Erin Brockovich, seem to have nothing in common while telling the same story.
Erin Brockovich and Spotlight were also based on true stories, an additional hook for moviegoers eager to believe that hard work, persistence and smarts can really overcome all obstacles.
Each of those films also contains an underlying anger that fuels the protagonists. They not only hate how people like them are being oppressed, there is the self-loathing that comes with being ignorant of the problem or even having helped in the injustice against others before finally coming to their senses.
In the age of reality TV, Hollywood has bet heavy this fall on more true stories like Spotlight.
Now in theatres, Sully, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks, tells the story of the commercial pilot who, in 2009, landed his plane, with 155 passengers aboard, in the Hudson River near New York City after a collision with a flock of geese knocked out power to the plane's engines shortly after takeoff.
Snowden, which opened Friday in Prince George, is Oliver Stone's take on Edward Snowden, the young American who blew the cap off the mass surveillance of foreign governments and its own citizens by the U.S. and its allies (including Canada) with his 2013 leak of classified files to The Guardian newspaper.
Deepwater Horizon was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this week and will arrive in theatres at the end of the month. It stars Mark Wahlberg as one of the crew of the oil rig that blew up in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 and causing the largest oil spill in American history.
The mostly positive reviews for each of these films stress how ordinary each of their protagonists are as individuals, as well as their extraordinary capacity to buck convention and risk their own lives to do the right thing and help others.
Sully and Deepwater Horizon have no problem garnering audience sympathy. Capt. Sullenberger clearly made the right choice landing the damaged plane in the river, regardless of what investigators at the Transportation Safety Board may have thought. The surviving crew of Deepwater Horizon, not to mention the millions of Americans living near the Gulf of Mexico, have plenty of reasons to be angry with BP, the oil rig's owners.
Snowden is a different story.
To millions of Americans, Snowden is a traitor who should return to the United States from his asylum in Russia, faces charges of espionage and possibly treason and be thrown in jail for the rest of his life or face a firing squad. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both refuse to acknowledge Snowden as a whistleblower, in contrast to a significant segment of their supporters.
Donald Trump referred to Snowden as a "bad guy" and then mentioned "execution." Snowden supporters are hoping the movie and a widely circulated online petition will encourage Obama to grant Snowden a presidential pardon before leaving office. Considering that Obama significantly expanded the digital surveillance and cyber warfare initiatives started by his predecessor, George W. Bush, that's highly unlikely.
Snowden, both the movie and the man, is an uncomfortable fit as a hero. On one hand, he made himself a wanted man for drawing back the curtain to show the unwanted intrusion of government into the private lives of its own citizens. Alternatively, he put his country and its citizens at risk by revealing the tactics security agencies were using to combat Americans enemies and keep the nation, its people and its allies safer.
Snowden, both the movie and the man, is an anti-hero, another common movie trope that falls easily into that well-worn theme that individuals are the only thing standing in the way of government and corporate tyranny.
