THE STORY – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange battled extradition to the U.S., where he could’ve faced a lengthy sentence for publishing classified documents. His case, centered on press freedom, took unexpected twists as it unfolded.
THE CAST – Julian Assange, Pamela Anderson, Edward Snowden & Stella Assange
THE TEAM – Eugene Jarecki (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 126 Minutes
It’s hard to know exactly what to feel about Julian Assange, the silver-haired mastermind behind one of the defining websites of the Internet age, WikiLeaks. While the site’s stated purpose of providing a safe space for whistleblowers to upload evidence of wrongdoing is a noble one, the site’s major breaks have all had political implications that have put a target on its back, to the point where Assange had to seek political asylum from Ecuador. The self-aggrandizing tone in which Assange speaks about his role as a savior of journalistic free speech makes it difficult to see him as anything other than a man out for his own gain, just like the people in power that he wants to hold to account. Then again, so much of the public discourse surrounding Assange has been dominated by people with a vested interest in undermining his trustworthiness that it can be difficult to determine the truth.
Enter Eugene Jarecki, who managed to get unprecedented access to WikiLeaks and Assange’s inner circle for his film “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” including never-before-seen evidence of Assange’s persecution. Getting that level of access undoubtedly required a good deal of coaxing on Jarecki’s part, and you can feel his wariness of being too critical of his subject, walking right up to the line of properly interrogating Assange without ever crossing it. Where Jarecki does get critical, though, is when he takes on the institutions that have seen their reputations suffer as a result of WikiLeaks. Jarecki and some of his interview subjects make a point of calling out how objective truth has come under fire from all sides in the 2010s and 2020s, and a good deal of that comes from the information WikiLeaks helped disseminate. Instead of owning their actions and facing the consequences, governmental institutions across the world retaliated, trying to deny any wrongdoing and casting doubt on the veracity of WikiLeaks’s reporting. The problem with this, as Jarecki’s film makes perfectly clear, is that the information was good and underwent an extensive vetting process working with veteran journalists from legacy institutions around the world. Of course, one of those journalists, Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, ended up betraying everyone’s trust and publishing data from the site’s largest vault of unvetted and unredacted data, including the secure vault’s password, in his book “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.” No one involved knew why he would breach journalistic ethics in such a way, and Leigh doesn’t have anything convincing to say on the subject.
Most of the film’s interview subjects are from the WikiLeaks team – Assange’s wife Stella, lawyer Jennifer Robinson, Siggi (a hacker who informed on Assange), and Joseph Farrell, listed as a “WikiLeaks Ambassador,” as well as some friendly journalists from British and German newspapers. Every single one of them has a pro-Assange bent, which serves as a necessary corrective to much of the contemporary reporting on Assange but also makes the documentary just as one-sided. Thankfully, Jarecki keeps everything as centered on facts and ethics as he can, refraining from sensationalizing the story as much as possible, a far more important corrective to the initial wave of reporting on Assange, which preyed on fears on both sides.
Jarecki refrains from adding any extra stylistic flourishes to the film, sticking with a straightforward talking heads format that may not be exciting but gets the job done. It is essential to keep the focus on the truth of the words being spoken; any experimentation with form would only draw too much attention to itself, even if the film does feel a little bland as a result. Thankfully, the many twists and turns of Assange’s story, told from the inside, offer more than enough excitement while watching. It also makes the film even more frustrating since what WikiLeaks stands for is something that should be a given. And yet, here we are in a post-truth, misinformation-fueled society that WikiLeaks’s existence helped to create. While “The Six Billion Dollar Man” could use a more critical eye on Assange in order to truly be the corrective it wants to be, it at least never veers into hagiography, correcting the record just enough for audiences to properly reevaluate everything they thought they knew about its central figure.
