The Snowden Files is a walloping fraud, written by frauds to be praised by frauds. Michiko Kakutani, the renowned New York Times book critic, wrote that it "reads like a le Carre novel crossed with something by Kafka." Really? It's more Tom Clancy meets Dan Brown, but without the crowd-pleasing plot, a thriller without thrills by the man who wasn't there.
That a work so artless, so exploitative, so self-congratulatory, so cynical, so perfectly mediocre as The Snowden Files could receive such blinding praise from such a reputed critic completes the farce. The Snowden Files is -- in effect if not in substance -- a window into the tiny, shrinking world of industrial journalism and the swindling hacks that live in it.
For Snowden's sake, it is fortunate that Oliver Stone and his production team seem to know what they are doing. Without their intervention, we might now have been facing another Guardian-inspired box office catastrophe.
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