Author: Gina

The Fifth Estate screenplay by West Wing writer Josh Singer is good, in fact it is a valiant attempt to dramatise the WikiLeaks story but, for all its style and panache on the screen, the story itself lacks drama. The principal characters face no real peril: just the amorphous threat of possible arrest. It would have taken a bit more to turn this film into a genuine thriller.

The significant action in The Fifth Estate boils down to a few keystrokes on a laptop…for dramatic effect the director Bill Condon inserts scenes of a large office of many desks in a dark cloud signifying the power of the WikiLeaks organization, staffed by just two actual people Assange and Berg in the beginning (a fine metaphor at first becomes a little overdone by the end of the film).

The footage of real life slaughter and massacre used to shed light on the scale of transgressions leaked to the world, eg. the 2007 U.S. military killing of Iraqi civilians and journalists from their helicopter in Baghdad, help keep the audience engaged. Though without a good media knowledge of the incidents – illegal political killings in Kenya, Church of Scientology workings, leaked US diplomatic government documents, Julius Baer a private Swiss bank being complicit in their clients’ tax dodging, and NASA – you are unlikely to find this a comprehensive education on the issues.

Those problems aside, ‘The Fifth Estate’, defined as a group within a society that is seen as operating outside of the society’s normal groupings, is a fitting title.  Although Julian Assange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) offsider and soon to be former bestie Daniel Berg (Domscheit-Berg in real life, here played by Daniel Brühl), is trying to send him a message over and over : “Julian, are you there?”  That could easily have been an alternative title for this movie as one reviewer suggested.

The film doesn’t ever fully determine whether Assange is a hero or a villain, as other reviews have said it takes cues from similarly ambivalent Facebook drama The Social Network. Perhaps the fact that the film is informed in part on Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s account of his time as Assange’s partner at “the world’s most dangerous website”, it leaves us with the impression that Daniel is the good guy here concerned about the consequences of their actions (publishing unfiltered, unredacted versions of the world’s darkest secrets on line).  Not surprisingly, the real Julian Assange called the film propaganda.

Assange, on the other hand, is the reckless, driven, shabby and slightly charismatic renegade with his dyed silver hair (a remnant from his childhood cult upbringing ). He insists on the truth from the world around him, yet manipulates his collaborators (who believe in the cause of WikiLeaks) for his own gain. Ultimately he sabotages friendships and working networks along the way. Only someone desperate to hide their own secrets could have invented a way to reveal those of the global governments and corporations, we are told, as a neat psychological summary for his motivation.

“He’s not a source, he’s the head of a huge media empire, accountable to no one. And we put him there,” says the Head of The UK Guardian.

This is probably the most thrilling moment of the film, the final act includes the mainstream media’s simultaneous worldwide release of those sensitive US cables.

In the end the film doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know about Assange, WikiLeaks and the media….and it does drag on. Two and a half stars.

Watch it for Cumberbatch’s finely wrought creepy performance as Assange and Laura Linney as US information security officer Sara Shaw who says “at the end of the day I’m not sure which of us history will judge more harshly” on she and  Assange, while aiming to make sense of the (stolen) 250 million personal (US Government) leaked files.

Director Alfonso Cuarón, apparently took four and a half years to complete this eagerly awaited film Gravity.

You may remember his famous 10 minute  accident scene tracking shot in his last film the moody classic “Children of Men”. He says this shot was an accident because he yelled cut but no one heard him.

Cuaron says he worked like that in Gravity too. Not that I could tell. Every tracking shot and scene are not only an incredibly emotionally gripping ride, but the scenes are finely crafted as we float in micro gravity as  the camera effortlessly glides through the  points of view of the central characters  Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) as each overcome one outrageous space obstacle after another.

One of the first questions I asked at the end of my suspended-disbelief roller-coaster through space was, “how did he do it?”

“How does one create micro gravity without leaving the planet?”

It’s a bit like asking the magician to reveal the prestige of his trick. It was four and a half years of storyboards and animation and rehearsals in very confined spaces for Bullock who credits her background as a dancer and NASA astronautic advice on the authentic way to hold and move a monkey wrench while floating 500km above the earth. I believe the director said he’d never make another space film.

The metaphors in this film are obvious.

• Bullocks’ character is literally in the inertia she is struggling to overcome.
• It is no accident she becomes foetal in the womblike Russian refuge she finds after overcoming the obstacles (in the shape of blown up Russian satellite fragments.

The jury is out on a couple of scenes:

• when Matt Kowalski floats back into scene after a long absence (see if you think it adds to the plot or is a bit of a post editing afterthought) and
• the earth’s atmosphere re-entry (impossible she doesn’t burn to a cinder).

Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, is mighty impressed with Gravity. The famed astronaut has  said he was “extravagantly impressed” with the film’s portrayal of zero gravity.

“Going through the space station was done just the way that I’ve seen people do it in reality,” he says.

Whether you find the plot credible and the special effects and 3-D elegant and commanding, Gravity places you right up there in space, along with the characters. That is the essence of Cuarón’s achievement: his technical virtuosity and the emotional grip it envinces become one.