Citizenfour (2014)

Very well executed

Fresh and Exciting

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Edward Snowdon's interview at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong was very bold, and I can imagine how would have felt whenever someone knocked on the door announcing room service. I know it's a trope in many spy/cop/detective shows, and thankfully Snowdon managed to make a run for it, or else the Oliver Stone movie later on would have taken a different direction.

This documentary came out of nowhere to me. It was quite captivating from the beginning. I have always been interested in NSA and its activities and quite fascinated by stories about NSA be it real or fictitious from good reads in Dan Brown's books to real documentaries such as Citizen Four. Now even though people living in the USA are well aware and quite up to speed with what happened in the cases of Snowden and Assange, people living in smaller countries like us do not get a lot of information on the media unless we pursue it crazily on the internet. But this documentary is a real eye opener for even a foreign national who is not in the thick of things, why? Because we use their software, their portals, their data exchanges, their email and their tunnels to communicate and browse the internet. Our whole personal lives on line are drifting through US servers. Right now it might be irrelevant. But some day when our countries are of use or are in the midst of some political agenda of US or one of its giant opponents, rest assured all those hidden away data will be mined for each and every bit of information that they can gather on us. We have no control over it and no choice. But my belief is that it is always better to be paranoid than not when you are on line. I'm no cameramen but those were some beautiful and genius camera angles matching little broken down contexts of the story as well. This documentary provoked the above thought stream in my head and certainly created some respect for the man who sacrificed his own freedom and went out of his way just to break the corrupt system. To say that humanity still comes first always.

A fascinating and amazing story about lengths a government will go to know everything and deny they are doing it ("...we were lying for national security reasons") but I wonder how many people will watch this documentary twice. The problem I found with Laura Poitras's film is that the subject isn't really visual. This would have been a wonderful long forme article in the New Yorker, Atlantic or Vanity Fair where copy editors knock it into shape to make every word count. Thankfully there is no print equivalent of out of focus camera work, visual padding with no commentary, white noise background sound (prevalent at the start of the film) or sloppy filming of three men, in a Hong Kong hotel, discussing how to leak secrets. It could all have been summed up in a few thousand words and two or three photos in a magazine.

-Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its U.S. premiere on October 10, 2014 at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014 at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Glenn Greenwald and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Oscars.--Reception:-Citizenfour received widespread critical acclaim. It has a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 129 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic gave the film an 88 out of 100 based on a normalized rating of 38 reviews. -Ronnie Scheib of Variety wrote "No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S. government's wholesale spying on its own citizens can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras's extraordinary documentary Citizenfour... far from reconstructing or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the world. Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways." -Spencer Ackerman writes in The Guardian: "Citizenfour must have been a maddening documentary to film. Its subject is pervasive global surveillance, an enveloping digital act that spreads without visibility, so its scenes unfold in courtrooms, hearing chambers and hotels. Yet the virtuosity of Laura Poitras, its director and architect, makes its 114 minutes crackle with the nervous energy of revelation." -Time magazine rated the film #8 out of its top 10 movies of 2014 and called the film "This Halloween's Scariest Chiller". Vanity Fair rated it #4 out of its top 10 and Grantland rated it #3 of its top 10. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, former Defense Department intelligence analyst Alex Lyda penned a negative review, calling Snowden "more narcissist than patriot". David Edelstein reviewed the film mostly favorably, and jocularly advised viewers "don't buy your ticket online or with a credit card". -The film site Fandor has published an extensive survey of other articles and reviews about Citizenfour, updated through December 25, 2014. --Lawsuit:-In December 2014, retired naval officer and oil executive Horace Edwards of Kansas filed suit against the film's producers "on behalf of the American people" for aiding and abetting Snowden's leaks. The Hollywood Reporter provided some legal analysis, noting observers opining that Edwards may not have legal standing to pursue the lawsuit. Edwards also challenged the film's Oscar eligibility on the grounds that Poitras' 2013 short film showing Greenwald interviewing Snowden constituted a previous release of Citizenfour, rendering it ineligible under Oscar rules. The Academy rejected the claim, noting that "the Guardian interview appears in less than two minutes of the documentary", and ruled that Citizenfour was eligible for Oscar consideration. -In February 2015, the filmmakers asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas to dismiss the lawsuit on standing and jurisdictional grounds, and on First Amendment grounds citing Bartnicki v. Vopper. The plaintiff officially dropped the case on April 3, 2015.