Julian Assange sits at the centre of this gripping account of the WikiLeaks founder’s rise, fall and protracted seven-year limbo inside the Ecuadorian embassy. Eugene Jarecki’s documentary takes its title from the price the incoming Ecuadorian government supposedly charged the Trump administration for helping furnish his extradition to the US, thereby reneging on a promise of political asylum. If The Six Billion Dollar Man doesn’t rebuild Assange, exactly, that’s because it’s more interested in comprehensively demolishing his enemies. Compared to the hypocrites, scoundrels and crooks who surround him, the man himself looks almost virtuous.
Actually Assange is mostly a background presence here. He’s more talked about than talking up; a karmic victim of his own success. While even his supporters admit to his personal failings (arrogance, cruelty, bouts of megalomania), the film asks us to regard him as a messenger shot down by bigger, darker forces; a man whose only real crime was publishing inconvenient truths. The Swedish rape charge, it argues, was largely cooked up as a means of delivering him to the US authorities, so that they in turn could charge him with violating the Espionage Act. “Julian Assange is not an angel carved in marble,” says the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (no angel himself). “But he’s not a vial of poison either.”
