Julian Assange is a very popular guy. Not only is he the founder of WikiLeaks, which is well known for leaking high-security secrets of governments, banks, etc. Now he's also the subject of two documentaries—Underground: The Julian Assange Story and We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks—and the feature film The Fifth Estate, which is generally one-sided, dramatized, and not as suspenseful as the trailers make it out to be.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) teams up with Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has founded a website called WikiLeaks in order to bring secrets out into the open. Their mission is to leak secrets because they believe everyone has a right to the truth and to also make sure that the identities of their sources are safe from winding up in the crossfire. Assange boasts to Berg that they've got hundreds of volunteers when it's really just him working under different aliases and usernames.
The movie follows the two of them from the beginning of their friendship (if you can really call it that) in 2007 through their work over the years; they hide behind alias names and publicize the biggest U.S. confidential leak in history, after which they both part ways. There is a lot going on in the film in terms of information being thrown around. A lot of scenes of the WikiLeaks staff typing away at their laptops does nothing to really move the film forward or even create a sense of a dangerous atmosphere.
The film, which sometimes seems like it's trying to be a suspenseful thriller, is extremely one-sided in its point of view. It obviously favors the perspective of Berg since the movie is based on his book and does well to overly demonize Assange. It slightly backtracks at the end to try and give us his take on things, but by that point it's a little too late. The film bounces back and forth between different players—David Thewlis with The Guardian and Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci, and Anthony Mackie with the U.S. government—and tries to make certain situations and people seem sympathetic. With so much time taken away from Berg and Assange, we don't get the building blocks for their foundation, of who they are as people or much of their backgrounds.
Not knowing much about Assange and his personality, it's hard to compare him with Benedict Cumberbatch's portrayal, but the actor does do a good job. Cumberbatch portrays Assange as passionate, obsessive, and sometimes arrogant and paranoid. He gets his true shining moment in the last few minutes of the film, but his performance might have been more layered if we had learned more of Assange's backstory rather than a small piece of information thrown in there during a fleeting conversation.
Daniel Brühl, just like Cumberbatch, isn't really given much to work with. But he does well with what he has. His best scenes are his angry bouts with Cumberbatch and when there's some drama going on, Brühl being the line that Assange shouldn't cross. It's a shame that there isn't enough for him to build on because both actors are great to watch when the material is right. There is a lot going on in the film and somehow it forgets that the focus should be on Assange and Berg and not third parties that are only present to hype up the drama. There's an interesting dynamic between the two characters that director Bill Condon misses completely. His point of view and opinion of certain events are clear, though it it might have benefited the film if he'd used a bit more balance. Condon includes other characters to build tension when, in reality, none of them have any merit or worth to the film as a whole. It's almost as if Condon himself is asking the audience to pick a side and this sucks the life out of the film.
The Fifth Estate starts off with a lot of potential, the beginning taking us on a journey through the centuries of information sharing. We see Assange and Berg begin their friendship, both sharing a hope to change the world before things spiral out of control and takes the movie down with it. Condon misuses his characters and tries to turn the film into a suspenseful high-stakes drama but falls very short in his execution.
