Too much screen time dooms The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

The Fifth Estate, about controversial Australian info-warrior Julian Assange and the Wikileaks saga, falls at the first hurdle

Benedict Cumberbatch (left) and Daniel Bruhl in The Fifth Estate.

FILM OF THE WEEK: THE FIFTH ESTATE [M]

Rating: 2 stars

Director: Bill Condon (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn)

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Laura Linney, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander.

Earlier this year there was a very compelling documentary released about controversial Australian info-warrior Julian Assange and the Wikileaks saga.

Its title was We Steal Secrets.

Now here comes a not-so-compelling feature film telling the exact same story.

A better title might have been We Stare at Screens.

Unfortunately, The Fifth Estate is doomed to settle for the same soft outcome that plagues so many movies centred on hard technology.

An unwieldy proportion of the running time is chewed up by people anxiously staring at laptops and PCs.

All they can see is scrolling text, progress bars, login windows and instant message updates. All they can say is a rehash of what they just read.

The experience is about as exciting as being locked inside an internet cafe on a long weekend.

On those occasions where The Fifth Estate can go offline and enter the real world, its stocks do temporarily rise.

This is largely thanks to a razor-sharp portrayal of Julian Assange by British actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

This first thing that really hits you about his performance is just what an astonishing feat of mimicry he has achieved.

Every physical, vocal and behavioural tic of Assange - and there are a stack of them that must be catalogued to credibly carry off this unique individual - are blended into a powerfully believable whole by Cumberbatch.

It is certainly not his fault The Fifth Estate can often be a first-rate snooze-fest. The same can be said of German star Daniel Bruhl and his solid work as Daniel Berg, the leading keyboard warrior in Assange's digital army in its short prime.

A tell-all book penned by Berg (Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website) served as the principal basis for The Fifth Estate's screenplay.

While screenwriter Josh Singer ably draws on this and other sources for the inside scoop on what made Assange such a dangerous outsider, making the material matter to the viewer is often beyond him.

If you have any basic knowledge of the subjects covered here, The Fifth Estate won't be loading your memory with any fresh data.

We all know Julian Assange is so socially awkward it hurts. We all know Wikileaks was never the 'organisation' he made it out to be.

Yes, Assange got up the noses of the wrong people. Yes, he acted recklessly with the dissemination of information that could have resulted in harm to others.

These facts and more are all listed by the movie, but are never utilised to provide any great insights for the viewer.

A decision by the filmmakers to leave out the incident that prompted a number of infamous sexual allegations against Assange is completely unfathomable.

Context is everything for a tale ripped from the most recent pages of our history books.

Extinguishing the flashpoint that forced Assange into a strange judicial exile (which continues to this day inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London) removes some much-needed relevance from the mix.