Review Of The Movie "Fifth Estate"

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  • ROGER4314

    Been Called "Flash" Since I Was A Kid!
    Rating - 100%
    1   0   0
    Jul 11, 2009
    10,444
    66
    East Houston
    The movie the "Fifth Estate" covers the development of the Wikileaks site. In fact, the entire movie is a flashback which shows us the furor of present day leaks then returns to the early days of Wikileaks.

    The movie was very interesting as I never really understood what Wikileaks was about. The movie explained in detail how that site came into being.

    Wikileaks was the idea of it's founder Julian Assange. He was a lot like I am. I NEVER believe anything that I hear until I check it out personally. For me, anything coming from our government has less credibility than that. It's total BS!

    Assange had a theory. If there was a way for people who knew of misuses, abuses or fraud and had a totally anonymous method to lay that out to the public, they would jump on the opportunity and make those things public. He designed a foolproof way to guard the sources. He was a hacker to the bone marrow so he knew all the tricks and was very effective at creating the kind of site that he wanted. The team created an amazing network of web sites to gather information and to disguise the sources.

    His first major effort garnered fraud allegations against a major bank and he brought it down....crashed!

    Later, US wartime gun sight cameras were placed on the site showing wide discrepancies in what the military did and what the public was told. To say the SHTF is an understatement!

    Still later, PFC Bradley Manning put about a quarter of a million sensitive communications on the site and it hit the fan again!

    Meanwhile, infighting between Assange and those who helped him start the site developed over how the material should be distributed. People died in these disputes.

    Assange's number 2 man beneath his beard is none other that the actor who played Niki Lauda in "Rush".

    This is a true tale and we all know what happened, so I'll share some reflections about the flick.

    I've never known anyone who lived, breathed, ate and had their entire lives rotating around computers. Computers were the essence of their lives and that was interesting to me. In fact, Assange showed up at the #2 man's apartment while the poor guy was in stage one of having sex with his beautiful girlfriend. There was a new scandal, so on went the clothes, and away they went...........much to the disgust of the lady! WTH?

    That level of computer obsession is a new thing to me and I was fascinated! As portrayed in the movie, Assange was not a likeable man. Most of us would like to slap him silly but he had a focus on one thing......transparency in government and privacy for the public. He was obsessed with that and sacrificed everything that he had to make that happen. The comment was made that they were doing all of that for free and that was the way the movie showed it. There was no mention that any of these people made money from this work, yet they poured every "Euro" they had into it, bought equipment and traveled to keep the network operating.

    The down side? There was an awful lot of jabbering about policy and philosophy. That got tiresome and the flick dragged a bit. The movie was just over 2 hours long and it held my interest pretty well. I wasn't sure how two hours of watching computer nerds would sit with me but it was OK.

    I learned a lot and gained some understanding about the whole Wikileaks episode. The Wikileaks era set the stage for the Snowden period. I am a lot more aware of what happened to our nation because of seeing this movie.

    I liked what I learned. The movie wasn't an action flick put it was plenty tense. The is no doubt in my mind that those in power would have killed these people to shut them up..........if they could have gotten away with it.

    Significance of the title "Fifth Estate" is explained at the end of the flick.

    My grade? B. It's worth a look even though it's not an action movie.

    Flash
    Target Sports
     
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