The Fifth Estate trailer sees Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-cheif Julian Assange is embodied by Benedict Cumberbatch in the first trailer for Bill Condon’s film The Fifth Estate. The movie is being modeled after the books “WikiLeaks” written by David Leigh and Luke Harding as well as “Inside WikiLeaks” by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and the film further dramatizes Assange as his site exposed government and corporate secrets and classified documents.
Watch the surprisingly entertaining trailer after the jump.
The film has an almost nega-The Social Network vibe to it in the sense that Assange also had good intentions that his ego seemed to slowly eat as it inflated, but his endgame wasn’t geared toward screwing his friends and helpers out of money. The film boasts an impressive cast, and the embellishments sure to be taken could prove thought-provoking and enjoyable.
Here’s a lengthy synopsis for the film:
Triggering our age of high-stakes secrecy, explosive news leaks and the trafficking of classified information, WikiLeaks forever changed the game. Now, in a dramatic thriller based on real events, THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization. The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society—and what are the costs of exposing them?”
The Fifth Estate is set to hit theaters on October 18th and stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie, Stanley Tucci, David Thewlis, Carice van Houten, and Peter Capaldi.