Movie Review: The Fifth Estate

Hey guys! It’s been a few days, but I’m back now! Recently I went to see The Fifth Estate, based on a book written by Daniel Berg about Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

This movie has been getting less than stellar reviews, and after seeing it, I can see why. The film spans between 2007 and 2010 and covers the entirety of Daniel Berg’s (played by Daniel Bruhl) association with Wikileaks, beginning the first time he meets the enigmatic Julian Assange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch). It starts with a few low-profile leaks, and ends with the leaks that recently put Chelsea Manning (still called Bradley Manning in the film) behind bars.

To begin, the acting is phenomenal. Cumberbatch and Bruhl work flawlessly together to lay out the relationship Assange and Berg had. Cumberbatch disappears into Assange, with a perfect accent and twitchy mannerisms. He crafts an insane, manipulative megalomaniac on an intense mission with few tangible goals. It’s brilliantly nuanced, and shows his abilities as an actor. Assange floats in and out of scenes, partially because the story is told from Berg’s perspective and partially to maintain some sort of mystery about him. Unfortunately, neither character is particularly well-written. It seems a shame to waste such talent. As a side note, Assange’s hair was atrocious, and I don’t mean just the style. The wig didn’t resemble human hair, and it was noticeably distracting.

The movie was billed as telling both sides of the story. Laura Linny and Stanley Tucci play for the American side as government officials whose friends, colleagues, and careers are affected by the leaks. If anything, I feel that they were underused. More of them could have made the plot a little bit more driven.

Also joining the cast are David Thewlis, Peter Capaldi, and Dan Stevensen as three reporters from the Guardian. They stand out as being part of a journalistic tradition that Assange is quickly working to make obsolete.

The writing really is just bad. It spends more than half of the more-than-two-hours building up to the main action of the story. It’s meandering, full of stops and starts that pull you in and out of action and make the movie drag on and on. The main problem with this is that it is hard to quantify the intensity of the internet into a movie. It’s a lot of close-ups on hands typing and the reflection of screens onto faces. It makes for a pretty picture once, but after an hour or two of that it gets a little old. The best part of the movie (sadly) is a montage of communication starting in the stone age and ending in the modern time that takes up the first few minutes of the movie. The movie is also generally humourless. The closest thing is Assange flailing like an octopus in a Norwegian nightclub. Together, these things had me looking at my watch around the hour-and-a-half mark.

This is the kind of movie that you watch on TV two years from now in the afternoon while you’re folding laundry. It won’t ever be my first choice for a movie, but it’s not strictly bad. The acting does redeem it. A little. I’d give it a 5/10.

What’s your favourite new movie this fall?