The new Julian Assange film produced by Touchstone Pictures, “The Fifth Estate,” has received predominantly negative reviews from critics such as The Guardian and New York Times in the wake of its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

“The Fifth Estate” stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange of Wikileaks and follows his story throughout the Wikileaks controversy. The film is the second movie of the year to try and follow the controversy, the first being “We Steal Secrets” (Jigsaw Productions) which was released in January and follows the story of Wikileaks in general.

“The Fifth Estate” follows Assange in a way that attempts to mimic “The Social Network.” While “The Social Network” used Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, as an anti-hero and supporting character, “The Fifth Estate” tries to use Assange’s friend, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, in a similar way. The shortcoming of Domscheit-Berg is that he can’t truly serve as an anti-hero. Saverin has ambiguity about whether or not he was a good guy in the movie. Domscheit-Berg only has his love-life as a subject of focus for the film.

The film is more a character study of Assange than a factual account of the details. Assange received an advance copy of the script, and has claimed that there are scenes that appear to be warmongering and biased against many middle eastern countries. A scene at the beginning is particularly troubling to Assange. In a statement on the Wikileaks website, he says that the opening scene is “fanning the flames for war on Iran.” A production team member for “The Fifth Estate,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, replied by tweeting “the Iran scene has been written out,” and also tweeted that Assange does not possess the latest copy of the script.

Assange was unable to attend the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival as he still has a warrant out for his extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. Assange remains in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK and was unable to do anything other than see an early copy of the script.

The film has been praised for its faithfulness to events and director Bill Condon has said in an interview with The Guardian “that’s one of the things I’m most proud of about it.” Conversely, “The Social Network” was told through a series of flashbacks that made it more interesting to follow. “The Social Network’s” use of flashbacks created a mystery and a desire to see how things played out. “The Fifth Estate” sacrifices mystery and coherence to keep true to the real life events. It starts at the point when most people began to really follow Wikileaks, in 2010, after the release of thousands of classified government communications. The movie then flashes back to the beginning of Assange’s Wikileaks story and unfolds chronologically for the rest of the film. As a result, the movie is-at times-tedious to watch.

“The Fifth Estate” has been praised by some critics for being more true to the real events than the other Wikileaks movie released earlier this year, “We Steal Secrets,” which has also been criticized by Assange extensively. Assange even saw fit to post the script of the movie on the Wikileaks website with corrections to all points Assange claimed were untrue.

The name of the film refers to a fifth political class that exists outside of the standard four. In politics, the standard four estates in politics is a concept that Baron de Montesqieu, an 18th century political thinker, devised. The four estates are clergy, nobility and the upper classes, commoners, and the press. The term “fifth estate” is commonly used in contemporary society to refer to blogs.

New Trier students have expressed excitement about seeing “The Fifth Estate.” Junior Shyam Thakkar said “I’m excited to see the movie after I watched the trailer.” Others were less excited to see it. Junior Zak Thompson said “I usually don’t go see movies of that genre because I don’t find them to be that appealing to watch. I also feel like Wikileaks is a topic that I know enough about, and isn’t interesting enough to me to go watch a movie for multiple hours.”

“The Fifth Estate” premiered in American theaters on October 18th.