‘The Six Billion Dollar Man' Review: Straight-Ahead Julian Assange Doc Looks Pessimistically Toward a Post-Truth World
The saga of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dragged on long enough, and complicatedly enough, to render a number of past films about him, if not obsolete, clear period pieces. Documentaries like Alex Gibney's 2013 'We Steal Secrets' and Laura Poitras' 2016 'Risk,' both produced during the Obama era, are informed by a very different political climate from the one we're in now — while neither could have anticipated how the Australian editor and activist's legal difficulties would escalate in the years to come. (Bill Condon's technothriller-styled 2013 Assange biopic 'The Fifth Estate,' meanwhile, felt premature from the get-go.) With Assange finally freed last year after 12 years of confinement or outright imprisonment in the U.K., the time feels right for an expansive catch-up on the whole knotty affair: Enter Eugene Jarecki's plainly presented but detail-packed documentary 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' which premiered at Cannes (with Assange himself present) in the festival's Special Screenings program.
Beginning with the founding of initially modest startup WikiLeaks in the mid-2000s and the swift impact of its uncompromising journalism in media and political spheres alike, the film progresses in mostly linear fashion through attempts by various national administrations to stymie and silence Assange, and concludes with his 2024 return to Australia after five years in a high-security British prison, following a successful plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. There hasn't been another running news narrative quite like Assange's, in which secondary players range from Donald Trump to Pamela Anderson to a sociopathic teen hacker from Iceland: There's potential here for grandstanding, but Jarecki tells this tall true story with the same probing, drily enraged authority he brought to his 2005 military-industrial complex doc 'Why We Fight' or 2012's drug-war study 'The House I Live In.'
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As a work of journalism itself, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' is a methodical assemblage of known facts rather than a revelatory investigation — though it may be an eye-opener to younger viewers who were less tuned into the news 15 years ago, and have become accustomed to a far more crowded and factionalized online media landscape than the one that gave rise to WikiLeaks in the first place. Formally, it's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction filmmaking, alternating archival footage — including, most interestingly, claustrophobic video from Assange's seven-year asylum in Ecuador's cramped London embassy — with talking-head contributions from an ensemble of Assange's associates, peers and journalistic descendants. The most offbeat stylistic imposition here is a series of tonally loaded chapter headings that begin with a 'Star Wars' theme ('A New Hope,' 'The Empire Strikes Back') before the conceit is oddly dropped two entries in. ('Return of the Jedi' would be a tough one to shoehorn into the subject at hand, admittedly; 'The Phantom Menace' less so.)
Among the interviewees is cultural commentator Naomi Klein, who explains how WikiLeaks grew out of an early, more idealistic incarnation of the internet, prior to the rise of social media, in which its primary purpose was to make information available to all, for free. Many of the site's early journalistic coups — notably the damning 'Collateral Murder' video showing civilians and Reuters journalists being killed in U.S. airstrikes on Bagdad in 2007 — made waves by exposing unjust or corrupt acts by those in power. Yet the fallout from such scoops often shifted to shooting the messenger instead, as the U.S. government in particular sought to paint Assange as a criminal for refusing to overlook their errors in judgment. 'When we've been lied to, would we rather not know?' asks famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in championing Assange's work.
Snowden frames the question rhetorically, though as the film reaches the Trump era of fake news and bad-faith far-right propaganda, Jarecki grimly concludes that many people prefer a lie they can agree with to the truth. It's that cultural turn in the weather that hastened and worsened Assange's downfall, triggered by a pair of rape charges in Sweden — into which the alleged victims admit they felt railroaded by police. It was Assange's very real concerns about being extradited to the U.S., however, that saw him improbably seek refuge in the aforementioned Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador's offer of asylum to Assange, too, is subject to changing cultural tides: The film's title refers to the amount offered in 2019 by the Trump administration to a new, more allyship-inclined Ecuadorian government to give him up.
Cue five years' incarceration instead, much of it solitary, in the U.K.'s notoriously punishing Belmarsh prison — where, insists UN human rights expert Nils Melzer, he was subjected to sustained psychological torture, and emerged as a frailer, more anxiety-ridden man for the experience. (Perhaps this is partly the reason for Assange's own limited first-hand presence in Jarecki's film.) Fighting his corner all the while is dogged Australian human rights lawyer Jen Robinson and Stella Moris, another loyal member of his legal team, who eventually became Assange's wife, and mother to two of his children.
Their personally colored interviews lend a more intimate dimension to a film that often, not inaccurately, presents Assange as a larger-than-life cause célèbre — an emblem of straightforward truth-telling principles at a time when AI, political spin and stubborn bigotry are allowing many media consumers to choose their own reality. 'We have given up on the idea that facts matter,' sighs Klein, while Assange closes 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' with an admission of the compromise that finally got the U.S. government off his case: 'I'm not here because the system worked, I'm here because I pled guilty to journalism.'
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