The Fifth Estate

2013

Action / Biography / Crime / Drama / History / Thriller

69
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 36% · 179 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 36% · 10K ratings
IMDb Rating 6.2/10 10 42656 42.7K

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Plot summary

A look at the relationship between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his early supporter and eventual colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and how the website's growth and influence led to an irreparable rift between the two friends.


Uploaded by: OTTO
January 12, 2014 at 11:58 AM

Director

Top cast

Kyle Soller as Young Staffer
Alicia Vikander as Anke Domscheit
Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange
Laura Linney as Sarah Shaw
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
922.03 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
R
23.976 fps
2 hr 8 min
Seeds 7
1.95 GB
1920*1080
English 2.0
R
23.976 fps
2 hr 8 min
Seeds 17

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by blanche-2 7 / 10

I actually liked it

I know I'm in the minority, but I liked "The Fifth Estate." Others will agree with me, though, that the best thing about it is Benedict Cumberbatch, who does brilliant job as Julian Assange.

I come at this film from a slightly different point of view because I still don't know what was so fabulous about "The Social Network." I understand the comparisons due to the similar stories. People seemed to find "The Social Network" incredibly compelling, but I guess it's a generational thing - I just didn't.

I attended this film with a friend who had only a vague knowledge of Wikileaks, and he absolutely loved it and found the "redaction" scenes toward the end of the film tense and suspenseful, as I did.

I realize that some of the film may be fictional, and that Wikileaks is a controversial subject. I can't pretend to know the truth. Cumberbatch portrays Assange as an egomaniacal, protective, arrogant man who refuses to compromise, even when information may hurt people. His right hand, Daniel (Daniel Bruhl) begins to see that Assange's dictatorial attitude and paranoia has gone too far and is actually in the long run going to hurt what could have been an important organization.

What should we know, and when should we know it? Assange wants to release unedited documents onto the World Wide Web. Yet in the beginning of the film, he wants at all costs to protect sources. He seems to forget that later on. That's all in the film, based on two books that we're told are biased.

Still, The Fifth Estate raises some interesting questions and also talks about the challenges we face now with news going out onto the Internet. I think some transparency is healthy; I don't think banks should help customers cheat the U.S. out of $30 billion in taxes; but I don't believe military strategy should be leaked, and I believe that sources should be protected. It seems like so much of what we hear today, from politicians and celebrities and publicists is "spin." And most of us are aware that there's more than they're telling us.

As far as the acting, Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci are marvelous in small roles; Cumberbatch gets excellent support from Bruhl, Alicia Vikander, Jamie Blackley, and the rest of the cast.

In short, Cumberbatch's performance should be seen and appreciated. I think this film has gotten a bad rap. It's certainly not an awful film.

Reviewed by Prismark10 4 / 10

Leaks r Us

There is an energy to the Wikileaks movie but the screenplay is just so plain that you just know the film is contrived by trying hard to be exciting.

The Fifth Estate is about the biggest whistleblowers in history and the fractious relationship between Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Bruhl.)

The film is based partly on a book written by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and it shows. He comes across as a more sympathetic character. We even get pointless scenes with his girlfriend who acts has his social conscious.

We see how the main characters met, both having an interest in online activism culminating in the release of the the Afghan War Logs in 2010. Then the release of the material obtained by Bradley Manning and the worldwide fallout it caused.

Assange increasingly appears to be an egoist. An unhinged liar, someone who lies easily and fails to protect his sources. It helps that Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy for the last few years wanted for rape charges in Sweden.

It is simply a case of a movie that was rushed out to capitalise on the news headlines caused by the Wikileaks saga. There was not enough time for a better script.

Reviewed by Horst_In_Translation 6 / 10

Always ambitious and occasionally successful

I won't tell much about the plot as, if you came to this site or consider watching this film, you will be at least vaguely familiar with the story of Julien Assange and Wikileaks and may or may not have seen some of the many documentaries on the topic. Maybe you're not so much familiar with Daniel Domscheit-Berg though, at one point a close associate to Assange and the man who wrote the book that this film is based on. The director is Bill Condon from whom I enjoyed the Twilight films he directed and also "Dreamgirls" quite a lot, so I probably had some expectations seeing this, even if the topic was not exactly my most interested of the year.

The story is depicted fine all in all and occasionally really interesting. The one big problem this film has is a common one. There's not really any likable characters in here. Maybe Domscheit-Berg was intended to be one, but either the way Brühl portrayed him or the way he was written makes him almost as unlikeable as Assange. And you can at least hold in Assange's favor that he has some kind of social disability that, to some extent, excuses his actions and behavior. Vikander is certainly nice to look at, but the whole love story plot wasn't particularly interesting either, which is actually a huge problem as the quality of these side-plots, slightly away from the core story in many cases makes or breaks a movie. The highlight of the movie is Benedict Cumberbatch. He lends depth and the right degree of intensity to a certainly very complex character like Assange and while I never really was a fan of his Sherlock Holmes, he managed to convince me here and stole pretty much all his scenes the highlight being the one with Domscheit-Berg's parents at their home. He's really very credible as a sympathetic man whose difficulties in social situations have turned him into some kind of paranoid freedom fighter who hides behind a screen and security software doing what he does best to avoid human contact mostly, not counting speeches of course where he addresses a whole crowd and not just one particular human being.

However, with the real Assange (still stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London) not being too happy about Cumberbatch's portrayal and how the character was written, you always have to wonder how authentic the whole product is as it's 99% Domscheit-Berg's viewpoint. Not taking that into consideration, the film is mostly interesting to hackers, other computer specialists or those who are interested in the whole issue of data safety, government secrets etc., but it's not really for everybody and won't make you particularly interested in the topic if you weren't already before. Maybe it's just one of these subjects that really needs 20 or more years to pass (like Brühl's other 2013 movie "Rush", he's excellent there, or the most recent Best Picture Academy Award winner "Argo") for cinematically very convincing scrutiny in theaters.

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