The Fifth Estate (15)

Truth is a funny thing - it's all a matter of perspective. Ask anyone of my ex-girlfriends why we broke up, and they'll tell you a very different story to the one I'll tell.

But we'd each insist ours is the real version of events.

So who is telling the truth in The Fifth Estate, a "dramatic thriller" about the birth of Wikileaks - the game-changing website that published all the things we were never meant to know?

Based, in part, on the book written by co-founder (or employee No1, depending on who you ask) Daniel Domscheit-Berg, The Fifth Estate attempts to show the birth of an idealistic dream.

What it also attempts to show is the flawed character of Julian Assange, the man who definitely started Wikileaks and is now Ecuador's most celebrated resident.

Directed by Bill Condon (a man with an eclectic CV, going from Gods And Monsters to Twilight via Dreamgirls), The Fifth Estate is trying to adhere to a simple journalistic principle of laying out the story and leaving the audience to draw conclusions.

Sadly, it struggles to do it in any cohesive manner. And it's certainly not a thriller.

This is not a terrible film. It just lacks a clear focus. Watching it, you are left with no real sense of who the story is about. Or what.

It could be about Daniel (played brilliantly by Daniel Bruhl, seen recently as Niki Lauda in Rush), it could be about Assange (another faultless performance by Benedict Cumberbatch), it could be about the battle to have the truth heard, it could be about how dangerous the truth is, it could be about the people harmed by the truth, it could be about how governments were slow to appreciate the strength of Wikileaks. It could even be about Bradley Manning, the soldier who leaked a tonne of stuff and is now doing time in an American prison.

But The Fifth Estate is actually about all those things, which is where the film hits a problem.

There's no clear focus. No central theme. And there are certainly no thrills (with the exception of the moment the US decide to get their man out of Tripoli).

In a way, the film falls down by clinging to the Wikileaks ideal of putting all the information out there at the same time - leaving us to pick through the start of the site, the involvement of journalists, the fall out in The White House and the cat.

Such an approach works fine on Wikileaks, because people have the time to plough through all the information - but in a film, we're just left with an overview, there's no real depth.

It's well acted, well shot and makes some good use of imagery of the imagined Wikileaks world inside the Assange bonce.

But it could have been so much more.

By narrowing the parameters we could have been given either more sense of what the founders went through, or the panic that flowed through the corridors of power (apparently only America was really bothered, the Russians a tad, but no other government is mentioned), or the damage caused by the Manning leaks.

Instead, we get a bit of all that. And a lot of Julian Assange. Which is another problem.

Because Assange has seemingly had no involvement in the project, we are left with the word of a man who fell out with him. Unsurprisingly, this doesn't paint him in a good light.

Similarly, my friends will say nice things about me. My ex-girlfriends not so much.

As I said earlier, truth relies on perspective - and the perspective of The Fifth Estate is skewed. It doesn't make it a bad story, you understand, but it forces you to ask how much you can really believe.

That Assange was a tad delusional is clearly a central theme here, a liar who wanted other people's truths revealed. But we can only know if that is true by hearing from him. We need another source.

Of course, we have another source here - Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy, written by David Leigh and Luke Harding and published by Guardian books (and serialised by The Guardian).

Incidentally, The Guardian comes out of this film looking like a reputable, respectable newspaper that acted responsibly. Just saying.

Sadly, this is a film that raises more questions than answers (not least how one man with no apparent income could afford to be jaunting all round the world). Maybe that was the point (Assange himself says you have to search for the truth), but it just leaves a big gap in the story.

Ultimately, The Fifth Estate should have been a really important film. In the same way All The President's Men catalogued the Watergate affair, so this movie should have told the story of the new game-changer in world affairs.

Sadly, something gets lost in the mix, leaving you to ponder on what could have been - and what really happened.