Note: Just last week (April 2023) a harrowing photograph emerged of Julian Assange, broken and prematurely ancient after four years inside Belmarsh prison, where’s he’s being tortured to death for the crime of doing real journalism. Ten years ago, The Fifth Estate helped set the table for his long and sadistic State-sponsored assassination. The people behind this movie are vile. The so-called “progressives” who still cheer Assange’s suffering are vile.

While Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald half-jokes about the assassination of Julian Assange, here comes Hollywood to do the bloodless part of the act. This tacky hatchet job from Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Pictures purports to tell the story of WikiLeaks but in choosing to use Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s version of events (he’s the discredited former spokesperson, formerly known as Daniel Schmitt, who couldn’t even get his own story straight in the book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website) the people behind The Fifth Estate spill the beans on their own agenda.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange as a magnetic megalomaniac (and occasional lecher) who—gasp—was raised inside a cult and lies about his hair. It’s a performance that will bring accolades for technique if not class. If he isn’t quite the creepy supervillain Bill Hader invented for TV’s Saturday Night Live, it’s because The Fifth Estate wants to have it both ways, kinda-sorta honouring the idea of WikiLeaks while putting a facts-mangling soap opera in the foreground. Domscheit-Berg (Rush’s Daniel Brühl) weeps as he watches the organization founder under its leader’s recklessness, ego, and bad habits. Meanwhile, those poor victims at the U.S. State Department—Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci in whiz-bang West Wing mode—work overtime to clean up the mess in the wake of the Afghan war logs and diplomatic-cables dump.

In an era when the First Lady is handing out Oscars to movies that glorify the CIA, the purpose of The Fifth Estate should be obvious. All you can do is laugh when Guardian journalist Nick Davies (David Thewlis, a long way from the emotional truths of Naked) warns Assange that he’ll be smeared by the biggest propaganda machine in the world. This is a movie, though, that inadvertently reveals itself every step of the way. Director Bill Condon tricks out The Fifth Estate with lots of digital razzmatazz, but there’s no CGI to conceal an absence of decency.

Georgia Straight, October 2013