Otherwise known as “The Edward Snowden documentary,” CitizenFour (no, that’s not a typo, the movie takes its name from an internet username that isn’t spaced) is a fairly good movie about the state of American surveillance and the creeping Big Brother aspect into the military industrial complex.
It’s essentially asking, “If a government knows literally everything about its citizens, is that really freedom? If privacy is dead, is liberty next?” It’s a tantalizing question.
What Works: I’d say roughly two-thirds of the film takes place inside that infamous Hong Kong hotel room where NSA-defense-contractor turned whistleblower Ed Snowden (who has the look and demeanor of a skinny Seth Rogen meets a mellow Steve Jobs) spilled the beans on government surveillance programs.
Snowden was correct in his assessment that a shallow media likes to focus on personalities, and prescient in his prediction that they will try to make him the story (they did), but it’s worth noting who the guy we see on camera really is: He turns out to be a captivating witness—-a lot more so than interviewer Glenn Greenwald and Greenwald’s borderline clueless U.K. assistant from The Guardian—-and he’s the rare paranoid person who has good reason to be. Despite what you might think of his actions, it’s clear he’s not crazy, and doesn’t have a lot in common with many of Julian Assange’s wikileakers (like Bradley Manning, who was mentally unstable). He doesn’t appear to be a guy with an axe to grind or a radical anti-American agenda to pursue, but rather a guy who actually had a really good life (loves his parents, has a stripper girlfriend, lived in Hawaii, made good money with defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton) and was willing to throw that away for something he legitimately viewed as wrong.
Was he right or wrong? Well, some of the testimony we hear outside that hotel room talks about how the NSA wasn’t collecting data that had anything to do with terrorism, and was more focused on collecting secrets of powerful individuals. [Who’s to say some of the secrets they collect on us now couldn’t be used to derail the political aspirations of the next JFK?] Does that really sound like something we shouldn’t know about?
What Doesn’t: Does the film get static in some spots? Sure. Is there a claustrophobic feeling in being inside the same room for roughly an hour of the film? Maybe, but that does do a pretty good job of letting you know what it feels like to be in his position. Is Snowden maybe too mild-mannered to really carry a full film? You could argue that, but I might argue that him not having a flashier personality makes the film more suspenseful, since we are watching an everyman hero caught up in something bigger than himself, kind-of like a real-life version of a Hitchcock thriller.
I will say though, that adding in Julian Assange and Jeremy Scahill for cameos really felt like piling on for only one viewpoint, and they might have interviewed at least one person who’d make a pro-surveillance argument. Plus, some of the scenes (like the one towards the end where Glenn Greenwald wrote things on scraps of paper for Snowden) feel like they’re trying too hard for dramatic effect. And that scene ends with a closeup of a piece of paper that reads “POTUS” and I think the politically ignorant will read too much into that (Entertainment Weekly’s haphazard reviewer focused on that), instead of the fact that the military industrial complex is literally thousands of powerful people, not just one. [Part of the reason Obama has had to go along with it so completely.]
What I Would Have Done Differently: If you care about the issue of surveillance, you’ll probably love this film. If you don’t, I’m not sure there’s really much that could be changed to this movie that would make you care about it.