Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012)

good back-story, and good acting

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Smart movie, nicely reflecting the hypocrisy of modern society, and modern media. Tackles general ignorance, and wish of a talented young man to use his talents for something bigger than ordinary life. Without pathetic heroism and vanity, which might be expected, but rather suggests some different model of behavior to smart young people. Decently low grade fine suits to movie with non-orthogonal ideas.

The actor playing Julian is riveting. The storyline about early hacking attempts and Woz' "blue box" used to intercept the old phone company mechanical relay system by spoofing tones was interesting to see. The movie was heavy on technology specifics without giving short shrift to the storyline of Julian's life.I loved the review of emerging Computer technology and the realistically portrayed old hardware.I was amazed how often the "white hats" were forced to play catch up with the techniques of the early hacker culture.

This film left me with the reminder of how little Australians know about the largeness of the characters in our countries history. Loved the simple outline of Assange's formative years, which I had little knowledge of. Was very enjoyable seeing IT in the time frame in which his international involvement started. The reality of period IT equipment, home pieces, telephone exchange, cheap city student housing, police structure was entertaining as well as a reminder of we're this fitted in my background. Was also enjoyable fitting Assange history into the news events of the day that I recalled, The Family. The 'one liner' written across screen at end, about custody battle, single parent child raising, leaves me hanging for the rest of the Bio. Very enjoyable documentary, would recommend to all, for both entertainment in terms of Australian 'period' piece & understanding were Assange comes from.

Whenever a movie has some political agenda or seems to, the reviewer votes divide into haters and lovers, ten stars vs one star and so on. I am an admirer of Wikileaks, but I can't view this movie so singlesidedly. Instead, I have to compare it to similar movies like Operation Takedown or even Hackers. Also, I have to take into account that this is not a big budget American movie, but an Australian TV drama.On that scale, Underground is surprisingly good. I wouldn't know how factual it is, but take into consideration that it is based on a book (that is freely available online) about the hacker culture, written when Julian Assange was a nobody. It has no connection to Wikileaks at all and none of the Assanges consulted on the movie (even though Julian himself said he liked it when he saw it).The actors were well chosen, the boy looks like Assange a bit, and they all acted pretty well. There are two known names in the cast: Rachel Griffiths as the mother and Anthony LaPaglia as the cop chasing him. As for the story, it was eerily similar to Operation Takedown: the morally driven hacker that raises a middle finger to authority in his quest for truth. Unlike Mitnick, though, he only paid a 2100$ fine allegedly because the judge sympathised with his family's "nomadic lifestyle".As for the main complaint, that the movie doesn't explain the motivations of Julian Assange, that is a good thing. Several pieces of the puzzle are presented: his obsessive personality, his cult leader step dad, his morally outspoken mother, his discovery of American misdoings in the first Gulf War. They all are just pieces. Many other exist and it is the role of the viewer to get or not interested in putting them together.My conclusion is that for people not interested in the hacker culture or specifically Assange, the movie will seem pointless. For the others, though, it is a good watch. There is, of course, some dramatization, changes of perspective and so on, but in the end it does well what it set to do and that is why I recommend it wholeheartedly.