With an opening slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, zeitgeist-capturing subject matter and a compelling lead character in Julian Assange, played by none other than Benedict Cumberbatch, it seemed on paper that Bill Condon‘s “The Fifth Estate” was going to shake things up this fall. But now, over a week since it premiered, it’s safe to say that isn’t the case. Received with mostly a shrug in Toronto, as we wrote in our review, the film disappointingly never quite captures “the revolution that’s still happening keystroke by keystroke on computer screens around the world.”
That being said, if you do see the movie, you will at least be given two solid lead actors in Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl, the latter playing Daniel Domscheit-Berg (whose book was one of the source materials for the screenplay), someone who came in on the ground floor of Wikileaks and was there for its rise, before clashing with Assange. And in the first of two clips below, we see their heated battle over ethics. In the second, we see just how worried governments around the world are about what Assange may have on his hard drive.
Check out both below along with a batch of new pics. “The Fifth Estate” hacks your webs on October 18th.
Hollywood can't resist propaganda, can it? Even General Robert Carr, head of the Pentagon task force looking into the damage caused by the Wikileaks publications, testified under oath at Chelsea Manning's trial that the Pentagon could not find ONE SINGLE PERSON who had been harmed by them. NATO even confirmed to CNN that they couldn't find a single Afghan villager they needed to re-locate. Yet this film shows TWO cases of people put in harm's way. Pure fiction, then.