The Fifth Estate is a movie directed by Bill Condon about the founding of the controversial website Wikileaks. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (and is based on Domscheit-Berg's book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website). It also stars Carice Van Houten, David Thewlis, Stanley Tucci, Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie, Alicia Vikander, Dan Stevens, Peter Capaldi and Alexander Siddig.
The film was released on October 18, 2013 in the States. The trailer can be seen here
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For six years, this was Disney's last R-rated release. The break ended with Stuber.
Not to be confused with the long-running CBC newsmagazine series.
Tropes associated with this film include:
- Adaptation Title Change: The movie was changed from the novels' original title Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World's Most Dangerous Website to make it more marketable to moviegoing audiences.
- Intrepid Reporter: Nick Davies. Truth in Television.
- Kick the Dog: It wasn't enough for Julian to suspend Daniel from service, he also had to spread rumors of Daniel having schizophrenia or that Daniel and his girlfriend Anke were government agents.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: What's that, Julian? They're making a WikiLeaks movie? When's it coming — oh.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Fed up with Julian's dishonesty, Daniel and the original Wikileaks team resign, delete the site and block Julian's access to the server.
- Morality Chain: Daniel's girlfriend, Anke, is this to Daniel. Meanwhile, Daniel attempts to be this for Julian.
- Pet the Dog: Despite the film arguably portraying Julian Assange as the villain (at least in scenes during the latter half of the movie), he does have occasional sympathetic moments, one subtle example being when he notices a young boy watching his outburst against Domscheit-Berg's "disloyal" behavior on the plane, seemingly considering that he is being a bad rolemodel for the child and ceasing his rant.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Fed up with Julian's dishonesty, Daniel and the original Wikileaks team resign, delete the site and block Julian's access to the server.
- Shown Their Work:
- The scene of Assange dancing in an Iceland club actually happened, with the same moves. In the real life video, a man can be seen in the spot at the bar where Berg sits in the film.
- As the real-life Alan Rusbridger pointed out in his review of the film, the leather jacket David Thewlis's Nick Davies always wears is spot-on.
- Sidelong Glance Biopic
- Title Drop: After Nick Davies tells Daniel about how the modern fourth estate was born, he dubs Wikileaks as part of the fifth estate.
- Viewer-Friendly Interface: Everyone involved in Wikileaks seem to use some sort of UI consisting of multiple columns of Matrix Raining Code.
