The Fifth Estate

We went to see this film last night and it was just as good as I hoped it would be. It refuses to make a villain out of Julian Assange, but it does show that he is a very strange and isolated person, a brilliant and charismatic and damaged person. And a lot of this is down to Benedict Cumberbatch, who not only acted the part with great fidelity, but also asked that information about Assange's background be allowed to come out in dialogue in the film.

 When Cumberbatch first read the script, he worried that it cast Assange as some kind of cartoon baddie. "I think I may get my head bitten off by Disney for saying so, but everyone agreed with that." He immersed himself in research, reading endlessly and interviewing people who knew Assange, and gradually the script evolved into a more nuanced portrayal. His performance draws heavily on his research into Assange's childhood. "I know it's a Freudian cliche to go, 'Oh well, when I was a kid…', but, to be honest, it's so profoundly true with Julian. To have been a child in a single-mother relationship, being pursued around the country by an abusive stepfather who was part of a cult – to be taken out of any context where he could discover who he was in relation to other people – well, to then become a teenage hacktivist, and evolve into a cyber-journalist, to me makes perfect sense. And he's still a runaway today. I find that profoundly moving." Interview here


Other critics have disliked the film because it didn't have a point of view. But for me, that was brilliant. It tried to show more than one point of view by giving scenes of stress and sadness to the government employees who usually have jurisdiction over secrets, in Washington, and it showed how the Wikileaks revelations affected them. It allowed the audience to see that some people are trained and paid to take care of secret material and to be responsible for it and for their fellows. Assange is not responsible enough to do what he has done. Between the actions of the very young and sensitive Chelsea Manning and the furore-loving Wikileaks leader, toxic intelligence was allowed to escape like untreated sewage from a storm drain.


But I also liked the relationship between the two techno-geeks. I could see exactly how they had become obsessed with what they were doing and the cleverness of their encoding. I could see how Assange had his friend Daniel on a string because their joint enterprise was so bold and so successful. They travelled from country to country setting up servers for their connections, and must have sealed their friendship on those long ordinary road journeys. The ups and downs of the relationship were eloquently conveyed and were at the heart of the film - a bromance, if you like the term. I enjoyed this film and I found it gripping, but if you are expecting something in the style of the Bourne films, you will be disappointed, because this is a much more complex film.There is really no hero and no baddie, because that all depends on your attitude to the idea of transparent government.

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