After marathoning Sherlock on Netflix two years ago, I’ll be honest, I would have made out with Benedict Cumberbatch. But he’s a big star now, so I guess that won’t be happening now. Fine. Whatever!. And since he’s a big star now he was in Star Trek, then followed that up with a movie about WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. Assange apparently saw the movie already, because of course he can, and we went full on Sinead O’Connor with an open letter to Benedict the Beloved. Hint: He’s not a fan.
If the film reaches distribution we will forever be correlated in the public imagination. Our paths will be forever entwined. Each of us will be granted standing to comment on the other for many years to come and others will compare our characters and trajectories. But I must speak directly. I hope that you will take such directness as a mark of respect, and not as an unkindness. I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film. I do not believe it is going to be positive for me or the people I care about. I believe that it is going to be overwhelmingly negative for me and the people I care about. It is based on a deceitful book by someone who has a vendetta against me and my organisation. In other circumstances this vendetta may have gone away, but our conflict with the United States government and the establishment press has created a patronage and commissioning market – powerful, if unpopular – for works and comments that are harmful to us. There are dozens of positive books about WikiLeaks, but Dreamworks decided to base its script only on the most toxic. So toxic is the first book selected by Dreamworks that it is distributed to US military bases as a mechanism to discourage military personnel from communicating with us. Its author is publicly known to be involved in the Dreamworks production in an ongoing capacity.
You can read the whole letter here, but it just goes on like that for a while saying everything must be questioned and that the US government is evil. You know, basically everything the trailer says.
