Citizenfour (2014)

  I have worked in the Intelligence Community for many years.  I have friends who work there still.  There is a lot of controversy surrounding Edward Snowden even now, so I was interested when this got nominated for Best Documentary a few years back.  It took a pandemic for me to finally get around to it but that's neither here nor there.

Edward Snowden, a contractor working for NSA in Hawaii, reaches out to a documentary filmmaker and a Brazilian journalist for help in exposing the extent to which the government and private companies are collecting data on American citizens and foreign allies as well as enemies.  He fears that the amount of information will be weaponized by an increasingly partisan political system.  To confirm, he leaks a large amount of highly classified data to be used by the documentarian and journalists around the world.

We can go around and around whether Snowden was justified in blowing this particular whistle.  The one thing we can agree on is that this documentary is incredibly boring.  It's hard to make people typing look cool.  The doc was clearly trying to stay on the Wanted Man angle and I get that it was probably harrowing but they never actually show any threats to Snowden or the journalists.  It's just a series of hotel rooms and video chats.

If you already had an opinion of Snowden, this will likely not change it.  If you don't know who Snowden is because you are too young/weren't paying attention to the news/thought it was overblown, maybe give this a watch.  Currently streaming on Tubi for free.