The Fifth Estate: Movie Review

The Fifth Estate: Movie Review

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Alicia Vikander, David Thewlis, Stanley Tucci, Laura Linney
Director: Bill Condon

From the director of the final Twilight Saga movies, we get this blockbuster insight into Wikileaks, its founding and its moral and ethical divisions. The Fifth Estate is an adaptation of two books on Wikileaks, (Domscheit-Berg's book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website, as well as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy by British journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding) both dismissed by founder Julian Assange as being propaganda and who's staunchly opposed to them.

The film starts with Assange meeting up with Daniel Bruhl's Daniel Berg at a techno conference, before recruiting him to the cause of revealing the truth via his fledgling whistle-blowing website. But the further into Wikileaks Berg gets, the more he finds his morals and ethics challenged by Assange's desire to publish all at any expense.

Assange has made it his crusade to reveal the wrongs of the world from the war in Kenya to Scientology.
But the pressure really grows on the group when they're handed the biggest leaks of their life from Bradley Manning and also the Iraq War Logs, which took in a Baghdad airstrike which killed civilians.

And it's here that the cracks start to show as the tension and conflict between Berg and Assange is ramped up - with Berg worrying of the effect and aftermath on those they name and Assange only being interested in revealing all...

The Fifth Estate is a case of style over substance thanks to its intriguing directorial choices.

With a pumping Eastern European score blasting out in parts, the film resembles some kind of ongoing music video with the trappings of a Eurobeat hit. Complete with some awful dialogue ("Super cool" and some "crazy shit in Kenya" being among the worst), the frenetic editing style gets the better of a film which could have been built solely on the idealistic tension and diametrically opposed attitudes of Berg and Assange.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a white haired paranoid genius who prances around like some kind of louche Iggy Pop style Messiahnic rocker, dispensing such bon mots as: "Courage is contagious" and "No-one can bar the road to truth" throughout to inspire his troops. It's telling though, that unlike Berg, we get to learn little about Assange and his motivation, with his methods and reasons remaining as much of an enigma at the end than at the beginning. Director Bill Condon throws in a few sample piece meal flashbacks to Assange's time in a cult in Australia when he was young, but proffers up little insight into his psyche. Cumberbatch gives a chameleonic and almost electrifying performance as Assange, working with what he's got and cpaturing some of Assange's mannerisms perfectly.

Tellingly (given the movie was adapted from his book) Berg emerges as a more rounded character, with personal insights into the sacrifices he makes as a co-founder being on display - a relationship with a girl played by Alicia Vikander being the main victim of Assange's moral crusading. Bruhl brings a kind of solid performance to the role which is unshowy and very nearly is sidelined by Cumberbatch's turn.

If those involved had chosen to spend more time on the tension, debates and conflict rather than crafting together some kind of extended music video, The Fifth Estate would have been a much stronger film and a greater insight into the Wikileaks sensation. A side story into a government department and White House security being compromised by the organisation feels shoe-horned in and sidelined in the wake of the overall piece.

By reducing The Fifth Estate to a techno thriller in the vein of Hackers (there's even a virtual never-ending office to signify Wikileaks' servers and embody the internet) rather than concentrating on the inter-personal conflict of the likes of The Social Network, you can't help but feel there's a more definitive WikiLeaks / Julian Assange film to be made - while The Fifth Estate is not exactly a mess, it does do a reasonable job of boiling down a complex ethical debate and organisation into a blockbuster thriller aimed at the masses.

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