The Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate (2013)

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R - 128 min - Biography, Drama - 18 October 2013
Big Blue Sky Rating : 5.9/10

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Director : Bill Condon
Writers : Daniel Domscheit-Berg, David Leigh
Stars : Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Carice van Houten, Alicia Vikander

The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world's most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society-and what are the costs of exposing them?

Definitely worth seeing but not the film it should have been

Australian information campaigner Julian Assange is a complex and fascinating figure and WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower web site that he founded, is a massively controversial project. So there is plenty of challenging material at hand here, but this film does not quite come off as the exciting and provocative narrative that it should have been.

Although Assange - currently holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London - pleaded with Benedict Cumberbatch not to take the role, Cumberbatch gives a very convincing and spirited performance as the human rights advocate with an ego the size of the Internet. Many people who challenge the most powerful in our society are branded as self-centred and even delusional, but the truth is that one has to have exceptional self-belief and a passionate commitment to take on the elites of the world. This is not a flattering portrait of Assange by any means because it draws on two books critical of him by people who have worked most closely with him and who feel that they have in a sense been betrayed by him, notably the German WikiLeaks expert Daniel Domscheit- Berg (played by Daniel Brühl) and colleagues of the British "Guardian" investigative journalist Nick Cohen (David Thewlis).

In an age when the ability to obtain and store vast amounts of information on governments, corporations and individuals is ever more possible thanks to incredible development in technology, questions about the legitimacy of holding, using, abusing, and revealing such information are at the core of what privacy and protection mean in the age of all-powerful governments and armed fundamentalist groups. Some of these issues are raised in the movie. By focusing on one US state official (played by Laura Linney) and one informer against his corrupt government, we are asked to appreciate that simply revealing everything that is leaked without careful redaction and the provision of context - arguably best done by conventional media like the "Guardian" newspaper

• is literally playing with life and death.

This is heavy stuff and director Bill Condon (previously director of bio-pics "Gods And Monsters" & "Kinsey") seeks to liven it up with some kinetic and flashy camera-work and surreal sets which actually detract from what needs to be a serious examination of an incredibly serious issue. The challenge was to make compelling story-telling and he does not quite pull that off. Part of the problem may be that stories are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end - although not necessarily in that order - and, in the case of Assange, the story is far from over and it may well be that Edward Snowden's story in the end will have the more impact and influence.

Watch The Fifth Estate Trailer :

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