This image released by Dreamworks Pictures shows Benedict Cumberbatch as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a scene from “The Fifth Estate.” (AP Photo/Dreamworks Pictures, Frank Connor)DENNIS HARVEY
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Ripped from headlines that still feel wet, “The Fifth Estate” dramatizes the fast, controversial rise of anonymous-whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its figurehead, Julian Assange.
Aiming to provide the kind of speculative personality portrait behind another sweeping digital-age change in communication that touches nearly everyone, a la “The Social Network,” helmer Bill Condon and scenarist Josh Singer’s film must also stuff in a heavy load of global events, all in a hyperkinetic style aping today’s speed of information dispersal.
Results can’t help but stimulate, but they’re also cluttered and overly frenetic, resulting in a narrative less informative, cogent and even emotionally engaging than Alex Gibney’s recent doc “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.”
After an opening credits montage that rockets through the history of news media, from hand-lettered scrolls to the Internet, the pic leaps into the peak October 2010 moment of WikiLeaks’ fame and notoriety, when Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) began releasing an enormous store of leaked classified U.S. government documents.