The Fifth Estate [PG-13] 2013 Review by Justin The premise of a man who creates a website that exposes secrets that governments, banks, and other higher forms of power try to hide seems like an interesting story, not to mention that it is based on a true events. By now, we all know that “based on true events” usually implies that some sort of fabrication or twisting of the truth is involved so you might not be getting the whole story. Which is a little ironic to me since this movie is about telling the whole truth about the things that governments would go to extreme lengths to keep secret. Anyway, does this movie do a good job of telling us a side of Julian Assange’s story? For me the answer to that question is “Meh”. I’ll start out with the negatives. I’m not going to say that this movie was completely awful because it wasn’t in my opinion. I strongly feel like the writing and directing could’ve been WAY better than what it is. There are scenes in this movie where Julian Assange goes into these weird dreamlike sequences, I guess to show what he is thinking. I didn’t think this worked at all really because this movie is trying to make a realistic portrayal of things that happened and these dreamlike sequences didn’t work with the tone of how the rest of the story was being told. The biggest problem with this movie really is the first half of it. It’s very slow and does get VERY boring at times. I feel like the first half of the movie is just a constant reiteration of who Julian Assange is how his website was changing the world. It tries to make this setup with dialogue that doesn’t really give the characters any…character. This makes it hard for us to distinguish Julian Assange from any other computer geniuses we’ve seen in movies like Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Most of the problems this movie has seem to come from the people behind the camera, as opposed to those who are in front of it. As for the good things about this movie, the two best things for me were Benedict Cumberbatch and Daniel Bruhl. But I’ll get to them later. I will say that the first half of the movie was really boring, but the second half or so really picked up the pace and that’s where the movie got interesting. The second half of the movie is really what you saw in the trailers. It’s where things get interesting and you see how the government was trying to do to deal with Assange and his website. As for the aforementioned two actors, they both managed to keep my attention. It was a little hard for me to focus on Cumberbatch at first because of the long white hair, which is pretty different from the looks of the characters I’ve seen him portray. Nonetheless, Cumberbleach does a great job portraying Assange. Even though the dialogue was pretty stale, Cumberbleach managed to bring life to the character with subtle details. The same goes for Daniel Bruhl (or as I call him, the one German guy from Inglorious Basterds). He did a good job as Assange’s “partner” Daniel Berg. This movie would’ve been much worse off if not for these two primary actors. The writing and directing in this movie really kept it from being a great movie. However, Cumberbleach (last time I call him Cumberbleach I promise) and Bruhl manage to keep this movie from being awful at the same time. Score 5.5/10.0 Justin
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 03:40:16 +0000
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