In a review of The Fifth Estate, Bryan Bishop praises its “painfully underutilized” actors but feels overall that the film “fails to deliver”:
[The Fifth Estate] is clearly enthusiastic about the broader cause of exposing truth in the first place. The sequence when WikiLeaks hits its stride is a clear rallying cry: [Wikileaks spokesman Daniel] Domscheit-Berg knows that the site is changing the world for the better, and [director Bill] Condon establishes an energy that makes one want to be part of that movement. The rapid-fire phone calls and split-second decisions as editors of The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian decide how to handle leaked documents take on the irresistible rhythm of the spy thriller — all the while the US government is portrayed as flat-footed and downright ignorant of the forces that WikiLeaks is harnessing. The thorny moral and ethical issues that develop — the tension between full transparency and the safety of intelligence agents in the field is the most prominent — are laid at the feet of Assange the man, rather than used to undercut the positive sentiment about the WikiLeaks mission itself.
In WikiLeaks’ own takedown of The Fifth Estate script, it describes the film as “irresponsible, counterproductive, and harmful.” In truth, it’s none of those things — if only for the reason that it would have to be a much more hard-nosed and effective film in order to have that profound of an effect. As it is, The Fifth Estate sits as mild, broadly accessible fare that should start a conversation amongst those that aren’t already familiar with the story — but won’t profoundly change the minds of anyone that’s been paying attention.
From a recent interview with Assange:
[Eva Gollinger]: Do you think [the film is] an attempt to discredit you and your organization?
JA: I don’t sort of look at the things that way. This film comes from Hollywood. I know the book that it was based on. The books were definitely an attempt to do precisely that. DreamWorks has picked the two most discredited libellous books out of dozens of books available for it to pick. But it’s coming out of a particular milieu about… within Hollywood and that constraints, it seems, what scripts can be written and what things would get distribution. I don’t know if that was the intent of the filmmakers. It’s certainly the result, but it’s been doing quite poorly in the reviews.
Indeed, its Rotten Tomatoes score is a dismal 39%. But contrary to Assange, Mark Kermode contends that Condon “goes out of his way to be balanced, perhaps overly so”:
Condon even gives his adversarial central character the last word, dismissing the film from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy, telling viewers that it this is only one version of a far more complex story, urging them to find out more for themselves. While this may be philosophically admirable, it doesn’t make for great drama, and for all its simplifications and fictionalisations, The Fifth Estate feels strangely unfocused, uncertain of how to deal with its slippery enigma.
And Jessica Winter focuses on the film’s omission of the sexual assault charges against Assange:
Precisely because The Fifth Estate is not a hagiography — its takeaway is of a difficult, deeply flawed and damaged person who did good things and may continue to — it’s bizarre that the movie scrubs out the legal case that’s cast a shadow over him nearly as long as the world has known his name. In October 2010, Assange fled an interview with CNN’s Atika Shubert because she wanted to ask a perfectly reasonable question about how the sexual-assault allegations were affecting the work of WikiLeaks. “I will have to walk,” he said moments before removing his mike, “if you’re going to contaminate this extremely serious interview with questions about my personal life.” The Fifth Estate obliges Assange on this point, but the result is a film that’s not merely clean but sterile, sanitized, redacted — exactly the kind of history-making that WikiLeaks set out to dismantle.
The Dish 