Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl
Directed by Bill Condon
Watching The Fifth Estate stumble out of the gate and lumber about, its hard to believe that Bill Condon ever had a hand in big screen musicals such as Chicago and Dreamgirls. Here, the director demonstrates zero ability to imbue his narrative with a sense of rhythm and little capacity for making the scripts dialogue sing.
The story of Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his WikiLeaks enterprise, this biopic kicks off with the websites coming out party the 2010 release of 92,000 classified documents concerning the war in Afghanistan before cutting back two years earlier to find Assange struggling to find an audience at conferences rather than gracing the cover of Time. Finally discovering an acolyte in Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), the Aussie anarchist sets about establishing an online platform through which whistleblowers might sound alarms without fear of reprisals.
In turn, Condon sets about depicting the inner workings of the web through a series of ludicrous CGI sequences unfolding in a hangar-sized office housing an infinite number of desks. Such visual analogies embarrassingly recall Senator Ted Stevens infamous assertion that the internet is a series of tubes. Their techno-dystopia sheen likewise suggests that Condon has only now gotten around to watching that Matrix movie that all the kids are talking about.
Such criticisms may seem like nitpicking but the reality is that Condons film offers nothing meatier to dig into. Revolutionary activism is conveyed through clichéd means and one of the most complex, contentious figures to recently grab headlines is reduced to an elementary collection of tics and glowers tailor-made for a universally acclaimed performance by Cumberbatch.
