The best way that the Academy Award nominated documentary "Citizenfour" (and likely winner with the Ebert documentary not even nominated) can best described is a real life thriller. The material is basically a good script for a great thriller as well. It was even said at one part in the film that it could come right out of a John Le Carré novel. It is the newest film by Academy Award nominated director Laura Poitras and it was an interesting watch from start to finish with only very few exceptions. Here and there the film became too technical (internet science) or too difficult in terms of the law to understand for broad audiences. But it's not too often luckily. The best parts of these almost two hours where the scenes where we see Snowden live in Hongkong while television reports about the events that he started. Edge-of-seat stuff. The weakest part is probably the ending. The whole "this is not the end by far" part with the paper snippets and everything and Snowden acting like "wow this is so dangerous" felt truly cringeworthy to me sadly. Like taken from a bad thriller movie.
Another positive mention goes to the fire alarm scene. I don't know if this was staged or real, but it had some comedic weirdness and danger to it. Nicely done. The film includes some sequences where we see chat communication between the protagonists which had already been done in the Wikileaks documentary from a year ago. That's not a criticism though. It worked well. Also, talking about Wikileaks, there is also one interview with Julien Assange about Snowden. As a whole, this is a good documentary with lots of contemporary importance. I am not sure if it is good enough to win the Oscar or if I would call it the best documentary film of the year, probably not, but its worth a watch and it is also certainly better than last year's very forgettable winner "20 Feet from Stardom". And it also offers some nice ground for discussion afterward about how it is acceptable to trade personal privacy for more protection from terrorist attacks. Anyway, nice to see Snowden stand up and tell people about the uncountable criminal activities of the Obama administration, especially in the light of people treating him as the new messiah after the Bush presidency. Boy did he disappoint in the last 6 years, not only in terms of his global surveillance.
Another positive mention goes to the fire alarm scene. I don't know if this was staged or real, but it had some comedic weirdness and danger to it. Nicely done. The film includes some sequences where we see chat communication between the protagonists which had already been done in the Wikileaks documentary from a year ago. That's not a criticism though. It worked well. Also, talking about Wikileaks, there is also one interview with Julien Assange about Snowden. As a whole, this is a good documentary with lots of contemporary importance. I am not sure if it is good enough to win the Oscar or if I would call it the best documentary film of the year, probably not, but its worth a watch and it is also certainly better than last year's very forgettable winner "20 Feet from Stardom". And it also offers some nice ground for discussion afterward about how it is acceptable to trade personal privacy for more protection from terrorist attacks. Anyway, nice to see Snowden stand up and tell people about the uncountable criminal activities of the Obama administration, especially in the light of people treating him as the new messiah after the Bush presidency. Boy did he disappoint in the last 6 years, not only in terms of his global surveillance.