Snowden Vs Citizenfour Essay

Snowden vs. Citizenfour: The Story of an American Hero? Snowden and Citizenfour are films that attempt to retell the story of Edward Joseph Snowden. A man who was fed up with over extension of power in the government and wanted to show the citizens of America just what their government was capable of and how their privacy was almost non-existent. He downloaded thousands of files from the NSA. The films try their best to show the story as accurately as possible. However, can a film truly depict the story in its entirety and with the upmost accuracy in such a short time frame? Citizenfour is a Grammy award winning documentary conducted by Laura Poitras. “In December 2012, a mysterious person known only as Citizenfour contacted documentary filmmaker …show more content…
One major is that in the movie Snowden, Edward informs his girlfriend that something is going on and that he needs to leave for a while, however in the actual event, Edward only leaves a note for his girlfriend while she is on vacation saying that he would be out of town for a while on a business trip. The significances with this difference is that the movie Snowden makes its appear as if his girlfriend was aware of what was happening before the release of the information. However, she had no clue what was going on and truly believed that he was away for work which tended to happen sometimes in his profession. There is also the key difference in the acting of the movies. In Snowden, the film crew and actors are all professional and the film was planned to a tee, but in Citizenfour, the lady filming the incident as an amateur documentary maker and there were no actors, only the actual people that were present at this event. This is so significant because a movie is planned and everyone knows what is going to happen, but the documentary was live and nothing had been planned for so the audience got to see exactly how everyone truly reacted as the news of the leaks broke