The Fifth Estate (2013)

Before this I really didn't know a lot about Wikileaks. I remember it being in the news, but honestly I didn't really care. This is the story(or at least Hollywood's version) of how it got started and essentially changed the way information is leaked to the masses. More than anything it's a portrait of Julian Assange(Benedict Cumberbatch) and how he is arrogant and pretty much an ass. More importantly the movie falls flat. It drags a lot and it's too jumbled up to be effective at anything it sets out to do. Cumberbatch is OK, but I've seen him in much better movies than this. Same with Daniel Bruhl, who was amazing in "Rush". It wants to be a techno thriller like "The Net", but ends up somewhere in the middle. I especially didn't care for the ending. The way it ends is just kind of like well that was stupid. SPOILER! it's a little interview with Cumberbatch as Assange talking about a wikileaks movie(kind of), and it is just ridiculous. No one narrates the movie so it's not like a "this is my story", which honestly would have been better. But, I will say this, the movie does make me want to learn more about Wikileaks, so in that regard it is a success. I know there is a documentary out called "Wikileaks, we steal secrets", and after seeing this, I don't think I'm gonna put that off much longer. Anyway, I've seen much better and I'm not sure who this would be best suited for. You may like it, or you may hate it. Either way, let me know what you think about it. I thought(and hoped) for a better movie, but they can't all be winners now can they?

You can't expose the world's secrets without exposing yourself. Good Film! The film was not bad. It was sort of an attempt to make a Facebook style film about Wikileaks and although it nowhere measured up to the quality of "Social Network." My conclusion is, that, this film is a good example of the new way of being critical. Pretend to be fair and at the last minute, throw up a bunch of negative facts. I believe that combining the positive portrayal of the U.S. state department with the crazy portrayal of Assange, was neither fair nor accurate. History will probably judge this film as just another propaganda piece of the corrupt powers that be. If I were to write this film, I think it would have been much more interesting to concentrate on the incidents of human rights abuses rather than on the Assange himself. It would have also had the positive effect of encouraging, rather than discouraging whistle-blowers. This film does not seem to inspire anything. The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world's most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society-and what are the costs of exposing them?