Film Review | The Fifth Estate

From left: Benedict Cumberbatch, Carice van Houten, Daniel Bruhl and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Teodor Reljic

Films based on true events are almost always crushingly dull. This is because shoe-horning a slice of history into a Hollywood blockbuster format means that the story loses all of its immediacy and variety to collapse into complete clich.

If you want to make a film about real-life events, a documentary will do just fine. A documentary may have its limitations and will not - by definition - feature top-billing superstar actors, but at least you'll be more or less free to tell the story without the trappings of tired and all-too-familiar plot devices that we've seen in a dozen other films before: be they entirely fictional or kind-of fictional.

Of course, every rule has its exception, and we've actually been privy to one quite recently. Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street was a wild, rollicking ride - a satire that took no prisoners (unless you - rightly - consider its prisoners to be its unapologetically venal protagonists).

But there's the rub: making an artistic effort makes all the difference, not to mention the fact that Scorcese has experience, vision and confidence in spades. Plus, his source material - a memoir penned by his subject - already snugly fits his directorial MO.

No such luck with Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate. Cobbled together from all-too-recent events detailing the history of the controversial whistle-blowing website run by Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), it knows it has very little to go on but plugs its gaps with clichs, not creative solutions.

Much like the far superior 2010 thriller The Social Network - in which director David Lynch spun the tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spurned ex-business partner Eduardo Saverin - The Fifth Estate attempts to hook its viewers by means of a similar 'frenemies' two-hander; the only difference being that instead of a revolutionary social media platform, here we're dealing with a far-more-literally revolutionary online space.

In this case, the put-upon sidekick is Daniel Berg (played by German actor Daniel Bruhl, last seen as F1 racer Niki Lauda in Rush). Just as The Social Network was based largely on the supposed injured party's (aka Saverin's) version of events, The Fifth Estate is partly sourced from Berg's own account of his time as founding partner of Wikileaks and Assange's right-hand-man. As such, the film was pre-emptively denounced as a hatchet job by Assange - currently in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

But bias is the least of the film's concern. If anything, director Bill Condon (Kinsey) and screenwriter Josh Singer (TV's The West Wing) could have done with being a little less 'balanced' and a little more striking in their approach.

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Film Review | The Fifth Estate