Movie review: We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks

MOVIE REVIEW: Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't mind firing away at some big targets.

julian assange

MOVIE REVIEW: Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't mind firing away at some big targets.

However, the sheer scope of his subjects - most recently, the Catholic Church - does not make them any easier to hit.

While Gibney's latest powerfully contentious doco is very much the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, its findings do not begin and end with the exiled Australian info-warrior.

No, We Steal Secrets is also the strange, sad tale of US Army Private Bradley Manning.

At only 22, this low-level analyst leaked the 750,000 restricted documents that propelled WikiLeaks to worldwide notoriety.

A lonely, gender-conflicted soul who was never cut out for military service, Manning seems an unlikely candidate for a history-making act of rebellion.

Gibney's documentary brings this murkily misunderstood figure into sharper focus than ever before. With his controversial trial in the US not over, We Steal Secrets is sure to elevate Manning to hero status in some circles.

It is just as certain that We Steal Secrets will play a significant role in changing certain people's perceptions of Julian Assange.

By simply following the chronology of the WikiLeaks saga well past the movement's brief, yet astonishing peak as a global influence, a curiously fractured portrait of Assange takes shape. Look at the man from one angle, and he is undoubtedly a digital prophet for a new frontier in informational transparency.

Try another angle, and Assange comes across as an analog charlatan of the old school.

A long line of close friends and collaborators talk of a paranoid, somewhat shonky operator for whom transparency ends if the information concerns him.

Assange was offered his chance to set the record straight for Gibney's cameras, but demanded a flat $1 million fee before he started yapping.

By the end of We Steal Secrets, Julian Assange is hiding in a small corner of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, hoping some unsavoury charges laid against him in Sweden may one day disappear.

What remains of WikiLeaks is little more than a circus. In what guise will Julian Assange re-emerge when those seedy storm clouds have passed? As ringmaster? Or clown?

> We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks [M]
Rating: 3/5
Director: Alex Gibney (Silence in the House of God)
Starring: Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, James Ball, Michael Hayden

"A kick in the Assange"