Citizenfour is without question an extremely important topic for a documentary. I would even go so far as to say that humanity’s decision on Ed Snowden and his whistleblowing/treason will probably presage the future of the entire human race. If humanity decides he was a hero and chooses to defend true democracy and all it stands for (in particular: liberty/privacy), the human race probably has a reasonable chance of dignified survival. If we instead choose tyrannical, secret government aligned with multinational corporations, collecting and permanently storing every writing, utterance, and action of our lives for future exploitation (by whomever, and for whatever reason), I’m pretty sure humanity’s future is quite bleak, and in that case I’ll be glad I have no kids that would have to experience that world. But my first order of business as a film reviewer is to review the documentary itself, not just its topic, so rather than belabor my own personal views let me instead focus on the effectiveness of Citizenfour as a vehicle for these ideas.

Honestly, I was quite disappointed with Citizenfour as a documentary. It has some good points, mainly the atmosphere generated by its use of written narration throughout the movie. But the film is strangely cursory in its treatment of many topics, and the way its information is structured is a bit of a mess. Much of the documentary is shot in Snowden’s hotel room in Hong Kong, but what transpires there is surprisingly uninteresting. There’s a lot of shots of Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill looking at screens or pads, and the discussion between them comes across as weirdly superficial and disjointed. I thought I would come away with a deeper sense of Snowden’s philosophy behind his actions than I had acquired by following the story through the alternative press and YouTube interviews; instead, the documentary is considerably less clear and articulate than what is freely available on the Web, including the short video originally leaked to introduce Snowden to the world (they show the lead-up to Poitras shooting that video, but not the video itself.) Perhaps they figured everyone had already seen that video, but the documentary choose to repeat a lot of other things people had already seen, and I’d much rather they’d chosen to revisit that video than show Ed Snowden combing his hair for 4 minutes.

For all the talk of the suspense the film conveyed, I was surprised to find that there was almost no suspense at all. The actual footage of Snowden is taken before the suspense really began, and the many interesting episodes that followed – the flight from Hong Kong, the actions of the Chinese, the long abandonment in the international zone of Moscow’s airport, the various appeals for asylum to many countries (and their wide spectrum of reactions), and lastly the eventual temporary asylum in Russia – are in this documentary either dashed off with terse, written summaries of what happened (summaries that do not even attempt to give any texture to the happenings) or they are entirely ignored. It’s quite a let-down when you realize that the actual live footage ends with Snowden leaving his hotel room.

As for the structuring of information, the film touches on various important and deep ideas – PRISM, XKeyscore, the spying on Brazil, Merkel’s phone, the GCHQ full-take system, the current U.S. persecution of journalists, the relation of drone strikes to the retrospective mining of data, and so on and so forth – but unless you had never before heard of these topics I doubt the documentary’s treatment of them would enlighten you, as they are little more than mentioned. Other important issues – like the reaction (and non-reaction) of the U.S. Government, or the economic pressure the disclosures brought on multinational corporations – are not even discussed. This is what confuses me about this documentary: what is its goal? If its goal is to introduce people who know almost nothing to what really happened, those people would be better off listening to a Glenn Greenwald or Jacob Appelbaum speech on YouTube, or watching the actual footage from the European Parliament session on these matters. If its goal was to make a serious artistic statement about the extremely deep philosophical and sociopolitical issues in this case, why the cursoriness of its ideas? If its goal was to let people get to know Ed Snowden more, why didn’t they talk to him more?

The most surprising thing I took away from seeing Citizenfour was the question: does documentary filmmaking even matter anymore, in the context of YouTube and the internet? Look up Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, and Jeremy Scahill on YouTube and start watching – the depth and breath of information freely and instantly available on all aspects of state spying and transgression of law is astounding! In contrast, who is going to see Citizenfour, outside of people who already know way more than the content of the documentary? The film has almost zero distribution; honestly, I’m surprised Poitras did not put it up on YouTube so at least people could see it outside of New York City.

I have tremendous respect for Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and all the other independent journalists who brought this story to the world, and who work tirelessly and under constant threat of imprisonment and death to inform us, the public, of things we should want to know about as members of a democracy and of the world community. I just wish Citizenfour had been a better documentary.