It’s too soon to judge the historical impact of Wikileaks, but true to its subject matter, The Fifth Estate is coming out anyhow. Everyone’s new boyfriend Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the white-haired Bond villain Julian Assange, here viewed through the eyes of German hacker Daniel Domscheit-Berg as they build their Wikileaks empire and start to piss off some powerful enemies. Cumberbatch is never not captivating, so a shame then he has so much less screen time than the more mundane Daniel Brühl as Berg. A little too close in framework to The Social Network, this amped-up biopic aims too low to grasp the changes in media and information Wikileaks and its strange, potentially crazy founder have started. The final three minutes, with Cumberbatch as Assange commenting on the film you’re watching and the nature of truth in media is a lone moment of electricity.
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2013.