Citzenfour is a devastating indictment of the Obama administration’s expansion of the NSA surveillance program and the logical outcome of the Bush era Homeland security act. With this controversial legal and political framework as the basis for the documentary, the filmaker becomes involved in the disclosure of the Edward Snowden archives from the NSA database.
The movie explores the theme of fame and celebrity, the role of the press in public discourse, and the nature of the internet in the second decade of the 21st century. This R rated documentary concludes the trilogy of director Laura Poitras, whose previous films chronicle the creeping surveillance state that has evolved in America since 2001. Terrifying in its implications, the documentary, soon to be made into a movie by Oliver stone, chronicles the management of the release of NSA contractor, “Edward J. Snowden”‘s archives from the NSA databases established in the American heartland to collect enormous quantities of information on citizens and foreigners alike.
The movie documents the relationship between the NSA and its international accomplices as they collect (every second) terabytes of information, including details such as keystrokes, passwords, streaming video, now stored in a massive database in Utah. The documentary is chilling in particular as it reveals the subtext of the “Snowden” leaks which were carefully orchestrated and so well disguised that they escaped the attention of the monitoring agencies established to protect them. Amazingly, Glenn Greenwald, Snowden and associates are shown witnessing the media storm they’ve created and manipulated for public effect. Snowden is revealed as a constructed persona, with opaque objectives in which the whistleblower is only one element. A masterpiece of conspiratorial film making, the Citizenfour is set to take the Oscar for best documentary of 2014.
OP February 2015
Alexander's Movie Reviews 