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‘The Six Billion Dollar Man’ Review: Straight-Ahead Julian Assange Doc Looks Pessimistically Toward a Post-Truth World
Eugene Jarecki's Julian Assange documentary 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' contains few extraordinary revelations, but it's authoritative and absorbing.
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.” 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.
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