DreamWorks Pictures has debuted the first trailer for The Fifth Estate, their upcoming true-life thriller that depicts the early years of the clash between the most powerful nation on Earth and a group of well-connected hacker journalists.
Based on the books ‘Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange At The World's Most Dangerous Website' (by Daniel Domscheit-Berg) and ‘WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy' (by David Leigh and Luke Harding), Bill Condon‘s feature film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the platinum haired hacker icon and Daniel Bruhl as Wikileaks co-found Daniel.
The trailer suggests that The Fifth Estate walks the fine line between calling Assange hero or traitor.
Check out the trailer.
Director Condon said:
The movie presents him neither as hero or villain. We just try to present who he is and let you make up your mind. I think, in fact, he's neither.
He added:
If you look at movies where that might have happened, they are movies that need something from the government, and that isn't anything we did. We had a few sources that worked in the State Department, but we weren't asking for any special access, so there was no reason to engage them.
Co-starring Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Peter Capaldi, Carice van Houten, Dan Stevens, Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney, The Fifth Estate hits theaters on October 18th, 2013.
The film is described as follows:
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?
See new pictures from the movie.
