The most cerebral and cunning moment in director Bill Condon's new techno-thriller, The Fifth Estate, occurs in its final minutes. Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) the founder and public face of the pseudo-underground document dissemination collective Wikileaks, speaks scornfully of an upcoming film about the organization. In the process, Assange not-so-subtly rebukes the The Fifth Estate itself, urging the filmgoer to seek truth on their own rather than relying on prepackaged narratives. It's a pleasing and thoroughly meta punctuation mark for the film, reminiscent of the point in JFK when Kevin Costner's Jim Garrison gazes directly into the camera and gravely declares, “It's up to you.” It's an obliquely self-important gesture, to be sure, but it's a damn sight more thoughtful than anything else in Condon's film.
The chief problem with the Fifth Estate isn't so much the portrayal of Assange or the events leading up to Wikileaks' massive 2010 releases of United States military and diplomatic documents. Given that the film is adapted from books written by former Wikileaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg and The Guardian editor David Leigh (both of whom have an axe to grind against Assange), it's unsurprising that The Fifth Estate generally praises the movement's goals while damning its founder as a reckless egomaniac. It's not the film's bias that unsettles so much as its triteness. Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) is portrayed as Assange's confidant and protégé, and his arc from hacker idealism to personal disillusionment is lamentably predictable and even downright tedious. That the film brazenly positions the Wikileaks story as the apotheosis of millennia of human communications while slathering on overblown, effects-laden visualizations of Internet communications only serves to sour what would otherwise be a merely forgettable experience.
