DVD Reviews: Snowden; Seoul Station; 1990: Series One

I DOUBT if there's even a sub-sub-genre of conspiracy thrillers devoted to whistleblower flicks, but if there is it's a thinly populated field and in it Michael Mann's The Insider is king. But whatever you say or think about Oliver Stone, two truths are unassailable – his avowedly liberal, centre-left political agenda and his ability to tell a big story on film. In Snowden, his 2016 biopic about NSA and CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, both are on full view.

Stone has always shown a certain genius when it comes to casting historical characters. He handed Richard Nixon over to Anthony Hopkins, Lee Harvey Oswald to Gary Oldman and Jim Morrison to Val Kilmer in The Doors, and in Joseph Gordon-Levitt he finds an excellent Edward Snowden: quiet, clever, intense, conflicted, nerdy and a little deficient in the personality stakes. Shailene Woodley plays Snowden's long-suffering girlfriend Lindsay Mills and there's an all-star supporting cast which includes Nicolas Cage, Rhys Ifans and, as Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill – the journalists who broke the story – Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto and Tom Wilkinson (doing an almost passable Scottish accent).

The story begins in June 2013, just prior to the publication of the first tranche of incendiary leaked documents, and, with Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald and MacAskill sequestered in a Hong Kong hotel room, unfolds in a series of flashbacks. In a cheesy edit in the final scene, a pan across the back of an open laptop replaces Gordon-Levitt with the real Edward Snowden, who's then seen being interviewed by video link on front of an audience by the real Alan Rusbridger, MacAskill's editor of The Guardian at the time.

The closing titles update Snowden's story. He's still in Moscow, where he ended up after fleeing Hong Kong, and Mills is now with him. But a snippet of news footage included towards the end of the film now seems portentous: a Donald Trump soundbite in which the future president hints that Snowden may deserve to be executed. Oliver Stone's re-telling of Edward Snowden's story clocks in at a hefty 134 minutes - but with Trump in the White House and the subjects of Russia, spying and cyber-security all back in the headlines, the real-life version clearly still has some way to run.

Seoul Station (15)

Studio Canal, £9.99

KNOWN primarily as an animator in his native South Korea, Yeoon Sang-ho hit pay-dirt in 2016 with his first live action film, zombie apocalypse thriller Train To Busan. Set on board the last high speed train to leave Seoul before a mystery virus turns the population into flesh-eating crazies, it blends special effects, comedy, drama and pathos into a fast-paced and highly watchable action movie.

In Seoul Station, Sang-ho returns to animation for a prequel which (sort of) explains how the whole thing came about in the first place, though it's notable for being bleaker in tone and far more political. There is mention of “the commies” at one point (an explicit reference to North Korea) and the police and army are portrayed in a far less sympathetic light than in Train To Busan. An underlying theme is the treatment of Seoul's homeless by the authorities and, as the film progresses, heroine Hae-sun's back story begins to take on more and more relevance: she's a prostitute on the run, and the “Daddy” apparently helping her violent, ineffectual boyfriend track her down amid the night-time mayhem is actually her pimp. The sun eventually rises after a night of slaughter and carnage, but things don't end well for anyone.

1990: Series One (15)

Simply Media, £12.99

BROADCAST in 1977 and never repeated, this eight-part drama about life in a repressive British state in 1990 was described as “1984 plus six” by its creator, Wilfred Greatorex, also the man behind the wartime drama Secret Army and author of the screenplay for epic 1969 film The Battle Of Britain.

In truth, the country Greatorex portrays is nowhere near as Orwellian as Orwell's, though the BBC has been abolished and replaced with an entity called British State TV (“All the truth in words and pictures”). Elsewhere the queen is now a king and illegal people smuggling is big business – though in this case it's out of the country rather than into it as stringent new laws have been put in place to prevent a brain drain to America.

Edward Woodward plays Jim Kyle, chief reporter on The Star, the only newspaper which isn't state-run and therefore forced to slavishly peddle the government line. Consequently, he sees it as his duty to provoke the government's ire, a job which brings him into regular contact with Delly Lomas (Barbara Kellerman), glamorous number two in the hated Public Control Department.

As ever with dystopian futures, some flights of fancy are prescient and thought-provoking, some seem completely out of step and others are laughably grounded in the era: Kyle has a secretary to whom he dictates his stories, for example, and Greatorex didn't think to imagine British Rail privatised or the power of the unions curtailed. The grey weather and Brutalist architecture are defiantly 1970s too.