Review of The Fifth Estate (2013) by Secara S — 11 Apr 2014

Benedict Cumberbatch's career is now experiencing a major spike of opportunities and roles. With an already unique crafted genius persona that can be put into anything we saw the beginning of the "Spot the Cumberbatch game" with appearances in August: Osage County, 12 Years a Slave, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. While his performances in these movies just consist of waving at the camera and being smart, British guy, his role as Wikileaks creator Julian Assange proved to be the only one demanding his presence. If it haven't been for Cumberbatch being all smart and British this movie would have been even more boring than it already is.

The Fifth Estate is a giant rip-off of The Social Network, but it doesn't retain any of the personal implication. You find yourself simply not caring about this weird guy with white hair and his partner. Like all movies that try to integrate science they explain everything through cartoonish exposition. It doesn't stop to explain something extremely interesting about an algorithm that decodes classifies files, because the focus is on building up this momentum of changing the world and opening the eyes of the public, which actually happened, but it's played up clumsy.

The events on which the movie is based have been heavily documented and studied and this could have been interesting just as a work of fiction, but as a story inspired by actual events it feels clumsy and missing the point. Benedict Cumberbatch is good, but he can't drag this one to the end.