James Bond producers sign on for Edward Snowden movie

Sony Pictures has announced it has optioned No place to hide, the tome penned by Edward Snowden's amanuensis, to turn it into a movie. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson of EON Productions, the production company behind James Bond films, have the job of getting the book onto the screen. The pair co-produced on Skyfall, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the "in the Interests of National Security" sentiments expressed in James Bond films

and the travesty of the Wikileaks film, I wouldn't leave much space for sincere liberal sentiments in such a film.

So expect the hero to be an anti-hero with an ultimately flawed character, questionable motives and non-orthodox sexual preferences.

[LarsG]

WHY?

Why make a film about it when we all know the story, the continuing story I should say.

Wouldn't it be better to make the film when it is finally reported in he press that he has died in mysterious circumstances, block of ice lands on his head, falls out of the door of an aeroplane, drowns drinking a vodka martini, electrocuted by his mobile phone, accidentally blows himself up while locked in the boot of a car, eaten by a crocodile, commits suicide with a pair of chopsticks....Etc.

Then at least we can speculate on which conspiracy theory is correct?

It would make for a better film don't you think?

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring?

Some IT guy starts telling you stuff........

Snore.... Maybe call the film 'Asleep in Sixty Seconds'.

[DropBear]

First things first, we need to get our hands on one of those "projects CRT contents on your face (preferably in green)" thingies from Alien - how else is the movie going to convey that he's h4xxoring the NSA right now?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

> But let's hope the writers and director have the slightest clue about computers.

Yeah. Normally this kind of hacking is made out to be far too simple: the guy sneaks into an office, logs into the nearest PC using someone else's password and downloads gigabytes of incriminating information that just happens to be sitting around with no real security at all.

No wait, that's what actually happened.

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

"Normally this kind of hacking is made out to be far too simple"

Perhaps they could jazz it up a bit by making out he broke a 128bit encryption whilst getting a blow-job (with a gun to his head) ? Nah, no-one would be stupid enough to believe that.

[Daniel B.]

They occasionally do get it right

One of the funny things about Swordfish is that at least some of the "techno babble" was accurate: 512-bit RSA can be cracked via quadratic sieve while 1024-bit still hasn't been cracked in a useful timeframe.

Other movies have at least tried to make some of the hacking plausible; Matrix Reloaded had Trinity use an ssh exploit, while Elysium had the Deus Ex Machina reboot/rewriting code written in some weird derivative of x86 assembly (and in true hacker fashion, segments of it are shown in shellcode).

I'm guessing it'll all fall down on which experts they're going to get, the real ones or the "Visual Basic GUI" dudes.

[JMcL]

"Perhaps they could jazz it up a bit by making out he broke a 128bit encryption whilst getting a blow-job (with a gun to his head) ? Nah, no-one would be stupid enough to believe that."

Nah you're confused, that's the John McAfee biopic isn't it?

[Youngdog]

Would need some work

I don't think setting it in Russia would work - why not move it to Eastern Europe or Germany. Also they will need to add some chase scenes and make him a trained super-spy to keep the audience engaged. Then throw in a plot device to make him sympathetic to the audience - perhaps he could be afflicted with some medical condition that absolves him of his previous actions.

That name won't work at all though - he needs something Bond-ish. Brown? Boon?

[harmjschoonhoven]

Re: Would need some work

'perhaps he could be afflicted with some medical condition that absolves him of his previous actions'

Young Snowden broke both his legs during infantry training and he was thereafter discharged from the US Army.

[Steven McAdam]

Matt Damon... 's all I'm saying!

Yeah, I though Ryan Gosling, or maybe Bradley Cooper.

But really, I favour a more farcical portrayal of Snowden, where we learn about his less well publicised Jujitsu and spy craft skills. In which case, it just has to be Matt Damon!

Come on... it'd be a great movie!

[NumptyScrub]

Re: Matt Damon... 's all I'm saying!

The Snowden Identity might be ok.

I'm thinking Rowan Atkinson though, in a Johhny Snowden type romp presenting the whole thing as one long comedy of errors. It may even help take some pressure off the NSA and GCHQ, if they can be presented to the populace as well-meaning but thoroughly inept spycatchers, who blanket surveil purely because they can't work out how to target properly...

You could put Hugh Laurie in as the House-like head of the NSA, Liam Neeson as the CIA operative brought in to track Snowden down, and Brian Cox (not the prof) alongside Brian Blessed as whatever relevant Russian guys. "Snowden's alive?"

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Re: Matt Damon... 's all I'm saying!

""Snowden's alive?""

+1

[beep54]

Re: Matt Damon... 's all I'm saying!

Matt Damon would be interesting, but you'd best go way back to the bizarrely prophetic scene in Good Will Hunting that starts with the question, "Why not the NSA?" for this to make more sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw

Still, Matt Damon just seems a bit physically wrong for the role. My first thought was Ed Norton, but he might be a bit old for it by now.

[Dan 55]

Well

I hope they get better writers in than those that did that clusterf*ck that is Skyfall.

To save me the time of writing it out, someone's already gone through it here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmoIDKqfY44

[VinceH]

Re: Well

"I hope they get better writers in than those that did that clusterf*ck that is Skyfall."

So what that bloke is saying, then, is that Skyfall isn't a documentary, but a work of fiction that has been made up, and requires some suspension of disbelief.

What a bastard.

[Dan 55]

Re: Well

I don't expect perfection from a Bond film but Silva's plan which needs a crystal ball to plan requires a little bit too much suspension of disbelief. And it's not like I needed some guy on YouTube to point this out to me, when I was watching the film and he set the bomb off it I had to suspend disbelief in the same way that I had to with Pierce Brosnan's invisible car.

[VinceH]

Re: Well

Ok, fair enough - I thought you were taking all of the comments in that video, rather than just a particular aspect.

I'm actually pretty good at being able to pre-judge the amount of suspension of disbelief is needed for a film, and therefore switch my brain off to the right degree - so I didn't have a problem with Skyfall at all. There are times when it does fail, though - and that's usually when the film is truly atrocious, which Skyfall wasn't.

The invisible car, though, is another matter. That one struck a bit of a nerve with me because the way they did it was pretty much the same idea I had in the early-mid 1980s, towards the end of my school life, and wrote into a science fiction story - which I then promptly concluded was a stupid idea and wouldn't work, so completely rewrote the story without the invisibility. So it annoyed me that all these years later some film company came up with more or less the same idea, and used it anyway, despite how clearly (geddit) stupid it was.

[Peter Clarke 1]

Plot Line

He's a computer nerd who gets the content of the NSA computer into his head. He's protected by two agents, one a very sexy blonde. He spends his time foiling dastardly plots by the evil organisation inside the CIA/NSA.

Oh, wait, the writers want the script for Chuck back!!

Mmmmm, Yvonne Strahovski on the big screen- I'd pay to see that

[Michael Hawkes]

IMO, Chris Pine (a/k/a the new James T. Kirk) would be a good choice. He's not all over the place, so he would probably straddle the fine line of being well-known and being cheap (relatively speaking). Give him some glasses and a beard, he can do the job.

[NoneSuch]

Alexander Skarsgard or Ryan Gosling would be the obvious choices. I think Skarsgard would be best being a relative unknown and decent character actor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shnowdon Edward Shnowdon. FIFY.

[Anonymous Coward]

A chilling observation ..

“The title of the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s impassioned new book, ‘No Place to Hide,’ comes from a chilling observation made in 1975 by Senator Frank Church, then chairman of a select committee on intelligence.

The United States government, he said, had perfected ‘a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air.’

That capability, he added, could at any time ‘be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.’

http://theketchumkeystone.org/2014/05/14/new-york-times-on-new-book-titled-by-frank-church-no-place-to-hide-from-nsa-statement/

[Anonymous Coward]

Closing credits

"The producers of the film, and Sony Pictures, would especially like to thank the National Security Agency for their selfless extension of help and cooperation during the entire production. For adding cogent and unbiased remediation to scripting, ensuring the accuracy of content and character, and for providing valuable insight into the inner workings of the Agency that no other singular source could alone provide. For lending moral support during the tedious editing phase without which the film would have gone overlength and overbudget. Thank you."

[Anonymous Coward]

Ben Stiller should be in it. It'll stop him ruining any movies that might otherwise be ok.

[Old Handle]

They're gonna mess it up, probably move it to a tropical island and give him a girlfriend who looks like a stripper or something.

[Herby]

This just in...

Maybe Bond fetches and neutralizes Snowden. The guy from the Guardian gets shot (it happened in another movie!).

Interesting plot?

Maybe we could gather ideas and subplots here to forward to ION productions (or maybe they aready doing that?).

[Daniel B.]

Snowden

I'd wonder if they're going down the James Bond route, the Jason Bourne one or (please no) the "Mr. Bean" err… "Johnny English" one.

Hopefully it'll be more Bourne-like.

[T J]

Avoiding disasters

So long as they don't accidentally make 'Quantum Of Solace' all should be well.