The Fifth Estate tells the interesting tale of the formation and rise of controversial website WikiLeaks, with a heavy focus on its founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) as well as his former partner Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl). The story is based on Domscheit-Berg’s own novel about his experience with Assange and WikiLeaks, 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, written by British jorunalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.
We start things off in 2010 just before Assange addresses the media about the famed Bradley Manning leak. Only Domscheit-Berg is frantic and wants Assange to stop. This serves as an interesting starting point as we then flashback to 2007 when Assange and Domscheit-Berg meet for the first time. Sharing the same ideals and aspirations, Domscheit-Berg slowly gains the trust of Assange, who welcomes him to join his site WikiLeaks. The site serves to allow whistleblowers the chance to leak private and dangerous information that the world deserves to know. The idea is, it protects the whistleblowers identity, to the point where even Julian and Daniel don’t know their identity. The leaker then feels safe enough to release even the most dangerous of secrets.
At first, things are going well for Daniel, as he grows closer to Julian and the site, and falls in love with a girl named Anke (Alicia Vikander) who worked at the same lame corporate day job that Daniel is soon able to quit. As WikiLeaks rises in notoriety, the relationship between Julian and Daniel becomes strained and troublesome. Soon Daniel loses Anke because of his commitment to WikiLeaks/Julian, but its of no concern to Julian who seemingly only care about the site, and ultimately, himself.
Things ultimately explode when Bradley Manning is exposed as the source of leaking hundreds of thousands of important government and military documents to WikiLeaks. Julian has no problem leaking the documents without redacting the names of the people who are listed throughout, which Daniel knows isn’t right. This causes the tension and friction to hit a boiling point, and everyone’s true colors are finally shown. “You’d be surprised at how many people have good ideas,” Julian tells Daniel. “But commitment..true commitment, that’s the hard one.” What Julian wanted was someone who was ultimately committed to him. When Daniel shows signs of having his own ideas and beliefs separate to Julian, that’s when he became a problem.
As a true story, The Fifth Estate’s story was naturally compelling and interesting. The execution on the other hand, left something to be desired. Josh Singer’s script is loosely bound by director Bill Condon who fails to really elevate the story to the compelling levels that it should have achieved. There are some cool shots by cinematographer Tobias Schliessler in showing a metaphorical image of WikiLeaks as a physical place in the mind of Julian and Daniel, but they become overused and lose their impact fast. The romance between Daniel and Anke is clunky and underdeveloped, not given any time to breath.
The film is held together by Cumberbatch and Brühl, who are more than reliability to deliver the goods, as always. There’s also good use of music, with music from Tame Impala and M83 being used wisely. But it’s not enough to recover what is a good story masked in a sloppy film that just misses the mark. There are signs and potential for greatness in The Fifth Estate, but it never elevates past that.
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