The ability of whistle-blowers to leak sensitive, and even secret, information is an essential check on the potential abuse of power by government. But Julain Assange, founder of Wikileaks, a website established to assist such whistle-blowers, is a deeply problematic figure: an egoist who falls out with his own collaborators with amazing frequency; a man who seemed hardly to take accusations of rape seriously; an instinctive anarchist who sometimes seems to be fighting not government tyranny everywhere, but exclusively in America. This documentary was conceived as a friendly venture (in fact, the film-maker quietly reveals she is not exactly a neutral party in the story), but the essential vanity of Assange is clearly on display. Ultimately, it's hard to avoid concluding that whatever good Wikileaks might have done has been fatally compromised by the man at its core.

The reviews for this documentary are all over the place. Reviewers who are firm advocates of WikiLeaks tend to over-exaggerate the film's virtues, while those who find the organization's actions reprehensible tend to hate it. I watched the film as an objective reviewer.Some have called the film a sleeper and there are parts of the film that live up to that branding. These occur mainly at the beginning of the film when scenes shift quickly and conversations are somewhat baffling and vapid.Assange emerges as an emotionally remote character who hides his true personality behind his dedication to WikiLeaks. He even states that what he does is more important than who he is. The only scene in which we get a glimpse into his repressed character is when he is interviewed by Lady Gaga, dressed in her Wicked-Witch-of-the West costume. Ms. Gaga, like most celebrities, tries to hide her insecurity behind false bravado and seemingly unfiltered, carefree questions which tell us more about her than Assange. In a clear case of projection, she asks about his relationship to his parents, wherein Assange claimed his father was "abstract".We do get some glimpses into the life Assange lives within the Ecuadorean Embassy. We learn about his relationships with his team and find out a few ways that the organization keeps itself protected from government intrusion. This may hold some interest for some viewers.The latter half of the film is more interesting, especially when he talks about the DNC hacking. I only wish this were expanded more as it is more timely. It is at this point in the film that Assange talks about the earth as so interconnected that any action must be considered a global action. It is an interesting an important viewpoint that should be considered. It is not simply "think globally, act locally". It is more that even a small local action may have global implications.The film leaves many questions unanswered and, as a whole, doesn't flow very well. It could have been better made. There is nothing compelling in it, meaning that a viewer may be tempted to stop watching the film entirely at certain points. There is no hook that makes us want to see how it ends. There are no compelling relationships and some issues seem unresolved that could easily have been. Still, a few scenes are definitely worth seeing.For those interested in the world of cyber security, political intrigue, and government surveillance, this documentary may be of interest. For the general public, however, it may simply be too dull.

"Risk" is interesting as a work of art, because Laura Poitras has a cinematic style that uses the suggestive power of images and sounds. The eerie avant garde music by newcomer Jeremy Flower dominates the soundtrack like in a thriller. It's a documentary that tries to be 'exciting' and 'complex', which is good for every work of art. But "Risk" wants to be journalism, too. It's about real people with real problems. It's more than entertainment. My biggest problem with the film is, that it simply doesn't deliver here, which is sad, because Laura Poitras had a unique access and probably has 200 hours of footage at home.The WikiLeaks lawyers wrote a long complaint about this film and they are right, I think.REPRESENTING WIKILEAKS LIKE A CULTWhy do we never see an interview with Sarah Harrison or the other women at the center of WikiLeaks ? What about Gavin MacFadyen, Vaughan Smith or other key people?By marginalizing the WikiLeaks women, and excluding all the other contributors, Poitras creates the impression, that Julian Assange is as dominant as a cult leader. The gender relations are characterized - in a non-verbal way - as unequal and the women as nearly submissive, always working like bees to 'please' their sinister 'master' Julian. The portrait that Laura Poitras paints of WikiLeaks follows the old stereotype, that it's an ideological sect dominated by one power-hungry man, who knows no limits.I'm sure, that the women, staff & contributors would have told a very different story of why they do what they do, but Laura Poitras only asks Assange a few questions - and nobody else. This is highly manipulative.CREATING AMBIGUITY INSTEAD OF REPORTING NECESSARY FACTSWhy did Laura Poitras remove the whole section of WikiLeaks' triumph at the United Nations, where top Human Rights lawyers decided that Assange's treatment was unlawful? By not showing this surprising victory - Sweden dropped the whole investigation now - Julian Assange appears much more ambiguous. Poitras clearly wants to create as much ambiguity concerning WikiLeaks as possible, which is O.K. for art, but not for journalism.It's the same with Jacob Appelbaum, who comes across like a 'guilty' person, even if the facts don't really support the view of Laura Poitras: While it's true, that there were allegations against him, most of them have been refuted by journalists and no official complaints exist. But Poitras still included them, because she has personal reasons: In the V.O. she says that Appelbaum "was abusive to someone close to me", which seems to be some kind of 'proof' for her. But we don't get a name or any information what kind of "abuse" Appelbaum committed, only the vague impression that he's a bad, bad guy. What did he do? Did he kick Laura's dog? Or did he tease her cat? Sorry, but that's not journalism or responsible filmmaking, because neither Mr. Appelbaum nor the audience can verify or refute an empty statement like that. It's simply a manipulation of the audience.LAURA KNOWS WHAT?Laura Poitras asks the audience to always trust her, because 'Laura knows', but this is childish.Why should we trust Laura Poitras to always tell the truth - if she even has access to it - when she sometimes doesn't even get small facts correct and manipulates reality for her storytelling like it pleases her?A beautiful example for the problem of manipulation-by-editing is a short sequence in a Berlin S-Bahn near the end, where we see Sarah Harrison. Everybody who knows Berlin can see, that the editing creates an impossible continuity: First we see the station 'Hackescher Markt', then we hear a voice announcing the station 'Berlin Hauptbahnhof' and at last we see her driving by the station 'Alexanderplatz'. The editing creates a nonsensical and physically impossible trip in this sequence, but only people who know Berlin will even see this.If Laura Poitras doesn't care about these details - that she obviously knew were wrong, since she lived in Berlin - then how much did she care about accuracy in other parts of her movie, where she asks us to simply 'trust' her ?Poitras also mentions in one sentence - like it doesn't matter - that Appelbaum used to be her boyfriend in 2014. That's all the info we get, despite the big credibility problems this creates for an observational documentary. To have sex with your subjects while you pretend to create an objective 'journalistic film' is ridiculous. Does Appelbaum come across as 'guilty' in her film, because Ms. Poitras wanted to take revenge on Appelbaum, who left her for a younger woman?THE MORAL OF THE STORYThe life of Jacob Appelbaum is more or less destroyed after this film, but Laura Poitras and her distributor try now very hard to win another Academy Award for this 'achievement' - this is obscene.She needs to simply present more credible evidence before she represents people as bad guys in her 'thrillers', otherwise it becomes unethical and morally troubling filmmaking.It certainly didn't made me appreciate Laura Poitras as a journalist, because she does care more for her art & drama than accurate & balanced journalism.VISUAL JOURNALISM HAS NOT THE SAME LIBERTIES AS ARTI'm all for trying new ways of reporting on real-life stories: Laura Poitras' "Field of Vision" project wanted to explore 'visual journalism' and it sounded exciting to me.But "Risk" is regressive in it's ignorant approach and does a disservice to the credibility of her 'visual journalism' project and the documentary form itself.More visual reporting and data visualization in journalism is good, but it has to be accurate, balanced, fair and based on legit methods & credible sources otherwise it becomes a work of art & fiction, that can't claim any journalistic value.Poitras' "Risk" definitely crossed the line.

In Risk, Laura Poitras, who in 2013 got called specifically by Edward Snowden to be there to document the moment he decided to release the information on how the government was mass-collecting data and spying on the US public at large, she puts her attention on Julian Assange. She actually started filming years before, around the time when Assange was first dealing with the fall-out of the rape allegations (still going on to this day, or at least the one that hasn't expired - what's going on with that, we don't know by the film's end, one can assume it's still pending). She originally screened a version at Cannes in 2016, but because of the banana-animal-crackers-WTF train that was the election, and Assange's role in (arguably) affecting a great deal of the outcome for voters concerned about the leaked DNC emails, she had to update it to reflect that outcome.So this promises to be a rather expansive look at this man and his times, and I suppose in a way it is. There are also some gaps; the movie jumps from when Assange gets into the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK via asylum (where, by the way, he has a personal trainer guy to help him, uh, stay in shape while not able to go outside, yes this is seen) to (briefly) a bit about Snowden and how one of Assange's lawyers got involved, and then it goes right to 2016. I wish we could've seen what happened, if only briefly, in those few years. Was nothing of consequence done by Wikileaks in that time? To an outsider, it might appear so, or at least in the shadow of people like Snowden and Manning perhaps Assange didn't have much to do while in exile... until those DNC emails, of course.At times this is interesting, but it lacks the narrative focus and suspense of Citizenfour. Then again comparing to other Assange movies, or at least one documentary, I think it's not necessarily that I *must* learn something new about the man, but I still consider We Steal Secrets, the Gibney doc from 2013, to have a more comprehensive *story* about this man (not to mention the focus on Manning, who is almost a footnote here). It gets a little better in the third act, after we're done seeing what Assange was doing in those heady years of 2010 to 2012, once it gets into 2016, but that also feels too short and we don't get enough from Assange to see where his head was at when it came to the release of the DNC emails.And I get what Poitras is trying to do here, and it's admirable that it's not the same thing as that we might get in a talking-heads Gibney approach; we're seeing process unfold as far as how Assange talks to his lawyers and associates; how he gets his message across to a spokesperson when talking about an info dump on Syrian military matters; how the news-people comment. But at the same time I'm not sure if there is an engaging through-line; with Citizenfour, to go back to that again, if you can get a really strong emotion going through your film (like in that one, total intensity and suspense of the moment), you can get by showing those small moments going on when not much seems to be happening. With Risk, it's... Lady Gaga now is going to do a (somewhat) shallow interview with Assange where she's halfway engaged with him and we get to see Assange with one of his people in the, uh, woods and he's paranoid about other people listening in. And... yeah, it's a series of things, with a more compelling character, Jacob Applebaum, popping up sometimes as the man behind "Tor" and who, most interestingly, has a relationship off-screen with Poitras that ends with him being sexually abusive to one of her friends(?!) Wow, where's that movie? Come to think of it, will there be a third movie about a hacker? Maybe the real piece of work Applebaum - followed by an Avengers like team up with Assange and Snowden? As far as showing the cult-like world that Julian Assange has created for himself goes, the depiction of that is captivating. But there's not enough *there* there, if you get my meaning. I wanted a little more of *some* sense of a side she was taking, even if she wanted to keep ambiguity.