The pro-Julian Assange lobby is already moving against The Fifth Estate, afraid the movie will be a hatchet job suggesting the Wikileaks founder is a power-mad, paranoid menace. We don’t know yet exactly what tone the movie will take, although as its based on a book by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was once Assange’s right hand man but had a major ideological falling out with Julian, it’s probably not going to be 100% pro-Wikileaks.
Now the first image from The Fifth Estate, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has arrived. Dreamworks has also set a November 15th, 2013 US release date (it should hit the UK around the same time), suggesting the studio is hoping for some Oscar love.
The movie follows Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Brühl), an early supporter and eventual colleague of Julian Assange (Cumberbatch), tracing the heady, early days of WikiLeaks, culminating in a series of controversial and history changing information leaks. The website’s overnight success brought instant fame to its principal architects and transformed the flow of information to news media and the world at large.
Director Bill Condon commented, “It may be decades before we understand the full impact of WikiLeaks and how it’s revolutionized the spread of information. So this film won’t claim any long view authority on its subject, or attempt any final judgment. We want to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age and, we hope, enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked.”
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