From Iceland — Where Was It Shot: The Fifth Estate

Where Was It Shot: The Fifth Estate

Published June 30, 2017

Who would have thought that a movie about people uploading files onto the internet accompanied by ‘Transformers’-style action music would flop? At least not the good people at Disney. The WikiLeaks drama “The Fifth Estate” fails, fails and fails. The critics hated it— it has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 37%; moviegoers despised it—it made just $8.6 million, against a budget of $28 million; Julian Assange called it a “serious propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the integrity of its staff.”

The movie has problems with factual accuracy, but it also commits the worst sin of all: it is unbearably boring. The dialogue is so clunky it seems possible that the servers the leaks were uploaded to wrote the script, rather than any human being, who presumably would have had conversations with people at some point.

But it does have one hilarious scene shot at their office at the Blue Lagoon. There, Assange and his team are planning to release the Collateral Murder video, while ominous music plays. You get to watch as they discus screen resolutions, memory space, movie pixels, RÚV employees and other riveting stuff.

Cumberbatch then stands deep in thought, staring over the lagoon, possibly contemplating how he got shanghaied into doing this shit movie. There are also rumours that Cumberbatch used the goo at the bottom of the Blue Lagoon to colour his hair white.

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