Watch Gripping First Trailer for Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’

The first trailer for Oliver Stone’s Snowden, a thriller about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was released Wednesday. The film will chronicle the U.S. government’s surveillance of its own citizens with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the title role.

While the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour showed the real-life aftermath of Snowden’s decision to leak documents pertaining to the government’s intrusive spying program, Snowden tells the computer analyst’s story from his military service after learning the depths of the NSA’s surveillance.

At one point in the trailer, Snowden and his girlfriend (played by Shailene Woodley) are in bed when he’s suddenly panicked and stares at the HAL 9000-like camera in his computer and wonders whether he too is being watched. The preview is packed with those kinds of moments, including one where Snowden smuggles the documents out of the government headquarters by hiding a small memory card in a Rubik’s Cube.

The real Snowden had an amusing response to seeing his life turned into a Hollywood movie:

For two minutes and thirty nine seconds, everybody at NSA just stopped working. https://t.co/OLjCV6wkGp

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 27, 2016

Snowden also stars Nicolas Cage, Rhys Ifans, and Timothy Olyphant, with the trio of trusted journalists in Citizenfour – documentarian Laura Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill – played by Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson, respectively.

Snowden arrives in theaters September 16th.