Citizenfour movie poster
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Citizenfour
Citizenfour movie poster

Citizenfour Movie Review

Now available on Blu-ray and DVD (Buy on Amazon)

It's scary that my reaction to Citizenfour is only one of mild anger, and even "anger" is too strong of word.

The Oscar-winning documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras is about Edward Snowden, the young man who, with top-secret access to NSA databases, made available to the public troves of sensitive data and more importantly insight into the tactics that the U.S. government is using to collect such data--with the potential to spy on any American for any reason, not just for terrorism.

The thing is, as Snowden insists during the documentary that is primarily shot over eight days in a hotel room, Citizenfour is not and should not be about him--his background, why he did what he did, the ramifications--but about what the government is doing, how it is overstepping its bound, how it--if it were a person capable of emotion or reaction--shrugs at what it's doing, all in the name of freedom and liberty.

The government is collecting data on you right now, as you read this, and will know if you buy or rent or read anything about Citizenfour or the NSA or the things they are doing to "protect" you.

I should be more pissed. But as Snowden, who is clearly a very bright individual, points out, today's generation basically acknowledges that privacy is a thing of the past and, on average, seems content with it. The reason, most likely, is that right now the lack of privacy isn't a "problem" per se... If you haven't done anything wrong, why does it matter if the NSA has data on you that details your whereabouts (based on cell phone data, credit card purchases, etc.), your online conversations, your Google search terms and everything else? The scary part is what's to come... what's to stop the government from doing more with this data overtime, if it decides it needs to crack down even more than it does now, to stop crimes before they're committed, perhaps even before people commit to what they want to do? Or to stop them from analyzing said data for other purposes, to identify dissenters or a thousand other possibilities?

For most, it's hard to fathom our government doing that--truly--but the blurriness of what's appropriate and what isn't continues to shift, and usually not in the favor of the rights of U.S. citizens.

The most powerful parts of Citizenfour to me was not Snowden outlining what the NSA is doing or how it's doing it--if you've followed the news over the last couple of years, you sort of know those things anyway--but the moments captured when Snowden demonstrates his paranoia toward technology--toward his phone, his computer, and just about everything else--and you know his paranoia is not coming from the mind of a madman but someone who is calm, intelligent and has very explicit reasons to be paranoid. He knows what the government is capable of and it's frightening.

There's nothing revolutionary about the way Citizenfour is filmed. Poitras primarily just shoots Snowden and reporter Glenn Greenwald conversing in a hotel room. It's no spy thriller, at least not in the way you envision, but the incredible thing about the movie is that it captures on film one of the biggest releases of sensitive data in the history of world, and you get to watch the events unfold over a two-hour period.

I wasn't blown away by Citizenfour the way I expected--primarily because I am desensitized more than I should be--but if you stop to think about the subject matter of this documentary, and the level of access this documentary had to Edward Snowden as he was written into the history books, there's no denying that this is an amazingly feat of journalism.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.

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