If you’re feeling a touch downbeat about the state of the world, Eugene Jarecki’s (Why We Fight) searching but sympathetic doc about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will not lift your spirits. With fly-on-the-wall footage, some extraordinary talking-head interviews, unexpected cameos (Lady Gaga, Pamela Anderson) and a sense of moral outrage, the American filmmaker takes on – and down – a global system of power that should worry the hell out of us all.
Jarecki’s film, a conspiracy thriller in documentary clothing, provides a corrective to the public image of this deeply polarising figure, showing Assange as a warrior for transparency whose intelligence leaks embarrassed powerful national interests and who paid a terrible price for it.
We see Wikileaks growing from a small team led by the determined, spiky Australian as it broke through in 2007 by releasing US military footage of an Apache gunship gunning down unarmed civilians and Reuters journalists in Iraq. The viral video, dubbed ‘Collateral Murder’, turned the organisation into a name that everyone had heard of, even if they couldn’t quite pinpoint its exact aims. Ambiguity grew, fuelled when Assange was charged with rape in Sweden and hid out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The women he was accused of assaulting appear incognito here, revealing that the Swedish authorities pressed charges against the wills of the victims.
But the Wikileaks of The Six Billion Dollar Man is a more considered and journalistic enterprise than in previous depictions (including the Hollywood version with Benedict Cumberbatch, The Fifth Estate). Assange is not let off the hook completely but he’s humanised as a geeky Jason Bourne with a brusque nature, who shared the darker secrets of the powerful and even experienced an unexpected love story during his self-imposed house arrest.
This is a conspiracy thriller in documentary clothing
Sure, it’s a somewhat honeyed portrait that lacks voices to put the other side across. But as the flimsiness of the case against Assange is laid bare, so too is a system that tried to suffocate, torture and crush him to protect its interests. Useful idiots like sociopathic criminal Siggi the Hacker, the supposed ‘star witness’ in the US’s extradition case, as well as surveillance companies, politicians of all parties, and the police all emerge as enabling forces.
Some of the culprits were supposed allies, too. The diplomatic cables that leaked en masse in 2010, and that saw Assange accused of endangering lives, turn out to have been the partial responsibility of a Wikileaks journalist collaborator – David Leigh of The Guardian – who published the encryption key as a chapter title in his book.
If, like me, you arrive at the story with some fairly half-informed views absorbed from media reports over the past 15 years, The Six Billion Dollar Man urges a deeper and more questioning engagement with stories like this. Knowledge is power in a geopolitical structure that relies on ignorance to flourish.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Dec 19.