Last updated on March 18, 2014
The Fifth Estate – From a standpoint of purely objective analysis, the story of WikiLeaks remains a fascinating window into the advent of the Internet – or, as I like to call it, “The New Wild West”. A lawless place owned by no nation-state or particular group, world governments try their best to regulate it every day and fail miserably. Information flows freely and without distortion, for both good (in the case of peaceful revolutionary movements) and bad (releasing the names of undercover agents throughout the world). If it weren’t for Julian Assange and his associates, we wouldn’t know how much power the World Wide Web holds. People can leak documents without ever being seen or discovered as a whistleblower, unless they reveal themselves. If solely for that, we should be thankful.
It’s also the only thing that lets me run a website about Christianity and video games, coincidentally. That’s a story for another day, however…
Still, we wouldn’t call Assange’s story a pure success. Obviously, he’s wanted for prosecution in several countries due to the release of sensitive classified documents. He might be a rapist, he might not be (depends on if you’re Swedish or not). Most sources portray him as a self-styled messiah, an egomaniac, a combination of the two, or simply insane. Maybe he’s just a guy that people love to hate for no other reason than he sticks to his principles of releasing any information unedited. The Fifth Estate shows him as all of these things, while also taking an evenhanded look at the entirety of this strange tale. And evenhanded, in most cases, means that it tries for that ever-so-fine degree of objectivity which never quite manifests in the film.
The problem with the whole deal, though, comes in the execution. Obviously, the history of WikiLeaks deserves a great script, a good director, and a fantastic actor in the lead role. Benedict Cumberbatch fills one hole, but the rest doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Rarely if ever have I seen a film revolve around “hacking” in the vaguest sense and still come out unscathed. Simply put, the subject matter works only on the intellectual levels rather than the realm of personal relationship. I’ve seen it before, and the only movie where it worked (The Matrix) turned everything into kung-fu fights. Film will always work as a visual medium, hence why constant exposition doesn’t work (see: the Matrix sequel, shudder).
The Fifth Estate tries to work around this issue by using Daniel Domscheit-Berg (former WikiLeaks spokesperson, now head of another similar organization) as the straightman. We could call him the indirectly noted narrator, and (possibly) our window into this environment of social justice computer “geeks”. Unfortunately, much as they set up conflict between him and Assange, you never get the feeling that things will end up well between them (sorry for the possible spoiler, but the world news spoiled it years ago).
It’s a predictable story told in the vein of the “super genius who goes mad” vein that Cumberbatch plays over and over again lately. When Daniel Brühl comes onto the screen, I just don’t care. And the girlfriend? Ephemeral; who even knows why she’s in here at all other than for being a token female character. Whether via characterization or otherwise, the movie needs to cram too much information at too fast a pace to develop anyone past whatever notions we already had.
And boy, does this film move from place to place! For the purpose of accuracy, if not film-making cohesion, the two men bounce from one European location to the other, moving so rapidly that we never get a sense of place or why they need to move so much. Plot points come in and out like an impressionist painting rather than cold, clear facts. In a movie about computers, mathematics, and science, how can you leave such details out of the picture? That becomes a problem, merely because the relationship and connections just don’t work.
Other characters flit into the story, and then out of the story, and then apparently I’m supposed to know who Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci are playing? Frankly, if you weren’t following this story in the news, I can’t imagine this making it clearer. It just adds a soundtrack and drama to news event! It’s a biopic in the most scatter-shot way, unable to decide its focus, meaning, or purpose.
Perhaps the greater problems lies in the film’s desire to balance its political position between two poles. I get the sense that the whole project wanted to avoid saying whether it thought Assange a genius-lunatic or a political messiah for the so-called “Fifth Estate” Information Age in which we now live. Probably due to Cumberbatch’s correspondance with Assange himself, I’ve got to assume the screenplay lightened up its criticism, instead trying to “soften the blow”, so to speak, about its own conclusion.
If the greatest plot criticism comes from its overall confused stance, then its lack of a clear position gives the film its greatest criticism: it is boring. Very, very boring. There’s no one to like, no one to root for, no specific emotional investment to make. Things just tend to happen. At least if the movie were terrible, and had terrible actors in it, I could manage to eke out some enjoyment at its awfulness, but not here. Nope, we need to see two dudes in a German anarchist night-club get angry at each other. Again. And then switch to Antwerp! And then to Iceland!
I like Benedict Cumberbatch, I really do. He’s been great in nearly everything in 2013 (seriously, he was everywhere, wasn’t he), but he can’t hold a dialogue movie like this up by himself. In the Fifth Estate, it didn’t happen.
All of this makes me really sad! I wanted to see this and tell you about how great it was, but the critics were quite right in this case. It just doesn’t work, and I think my response at the end of the film sums it up in a nutshell: “Well, that was a movie.”
