Entertaining, But Questionable Fact-Checking
Other than seeing the name "WikiLeaks" in news headlines, I previously knew nothing about it. The idea of a "true story" documentary about it was very intriguing to me. As a documentary, it is entertaining, captivating, and left me wanting more.
I went to WikiLeaks.org and found they had posted an annotated transcript of the movie. To my disappointment, the annotations pointed out "The film is filled with factual errors and speculation..." and provided links to all the sources to the contrary facts.
WikiLeaks also states "Neither Julian Assange nor anyone associated with WikiLeaks agreed to participate in this film. Any footage of Assange or WikiLeaks' staff was taken from stock footage. WikiLeaks has, however, co-operated with a film by respected Academy Award-nominated film- maker Laura Poitras, which will be out later this year. Another film, co-produced with Ken Loach's 16 Films, will be released shortly".
After reading the annotations, I felt...
Waiting for a Better Doc
On the good news side, "We Steal Secrets" is fast-paced, engaging and entertaining. It raises some interesting questions -- though more so about the nature of hero worship than about Wikileaks, and that is its downfall. There are so many huge, open questions about Wikileaks, about its ethics and its ongoing impact on the world and this doc really only scrapes that surface, preferring instead to spend its precious time on the prurient stuff about gender dysphoria and broken condoms.
To some degree, Alex Gibney's ability to tell a fully fleshed-out story was limited by who he had access to -- not Assange, not Manning and not anyone who has a current relationship with either of them. One can argue that this was the fault of Assange, who chose not to participate in this film for whatever reason (he tells a different story from Gibney, and there's no way to know what really happened there), or one can argue that Gibney rushed a film that should have taken a more painstaking...
Lots of Juicy Parts of This Story Missing!
This was a real disappointment from a Gibney fan in that big parts of the event were barely investigated....what happened to the people named in the leaked docs when they were outed? There was no "following the money" that made, makes Wikileaks run? What about the cyber army that spread the leaks further? Where was the interview with the New York Times? The whole story had so many more pieces, players and plot twists that were barely acknowledged. Didn't really end up a documentary but rather kind of a TMZ piece on "rock star" Julian and pity story on Manning whose sexual identity problems Gibney gave an excruciatingly boring amount of screen time to given what was left out.
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