WORDS: Eoin McCague

When the subject of your film publicly denounces it as “a serious propaganda attack” and a “lie built upon a lie,” one can assume that a few artistic licenses have been taken. The truth is that we don’t know the truth about the shadowy world of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and, despite what The Fifth Estate — a shallow platitude of a film — thinks, we never will.

Based in part on former spokesperson Domscheit-Berg’s book Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World’s Most Dangerous Website, the movie focuses on the early successes of the website, the relationship between Assange and Berg and the inflated egos that come with power in the digital age. Sadly, despite its brief stylistic flourishes, the film breaks no new ground. The Social Network did all of this three years ago, and better.

Benedict Cumberbatch stumbles for the first time in his career. His Assange (like the entire film) is skin deep; we see and understand the ego, but not the painful past or motivation behind it. Assange as a fictional character should be accessible in part to an audience, not just a perfectly pitched Australian accent with makeup.

Director Bill Condon continues his descent into middle-of-the-road irrelevance post-Twilight. He unfortunately never seems to find a way to make the real world implications of Assange’s actions interesting, while also failing to notice that scene after scene of coding is excruciatingly boring without a thumping Trent Reznor score.