Parky At the Pictures (19/12/2025)

(Reviews of The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange Colossal Wreck; and the Price of Truth; and Odyssey)

THE SIX BILLION DOLLAR MAN: JULIAN ASSANGE AND THE PRICE OF TRUTH.

Eugene Jarecki established himself among America's finest documentarists with cannily cogent items like The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002), Why We Fight (2005), Reagan (2011), The House I Live In (2012), and The King (2017). It's been eight years since his last outing and he returns on uncompromising form with The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth. This is not the first time Jarecki has hooked up with the WikiLeaks founder, as he interviewed him in hologram form from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2014. This conventional, but compelling follow-up tells the story of how he got there and why he couldn't leave.

Following state-of-the-planet summation by Julian Assange from inside the Ecuadorian embassy, the credit sequence fast cuts images from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump before Edward Snowden informs us that Assange is no angel, but he made us realise that we were being lied to by our governments and were entitled to know about it. Lawyer Jen Robinson also thinks that the truth should be out there and recalls how WikiLeaks started by publishing the Guantanamo Bay torture manual before posting the Collateral Murder video, which showed civilians and Reuters journalists being killed in US air strikes on Bagdad. Recognising that her compatriot was going to need protecting, Robinson took an interest in his case at a time (before social media) when the Internet was a free resource for sharing information and communicating. We hear from WikiLeaks staff member Joseph Farrell and various journalists who were inspired by Assange's philosophy. We also meet Sigurdur Thordarson, the teenage Icelandic hacker who joined WikiLeaks and became nervous after it released thousands of documents about the US conduct of the so-called War on Terror because he believed that a battle with the Pentagon could only end one way.

Speakers despair that President Barack Obama opted to address the leaks rather than their content and Robinson reveals that she started representing Assange around the time critics were calling for whistleblower Chelsea Manning to be executed for treason. Undaunted, WikiLeaks teamed with The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian to publish thousands of diplomatic documents exposing US policy and the conduct of negotiations with other world leaders. The papers also pointed to American involvement in the suppression of human rights, while one about the shackling and shooting of a household of civilians led to Iraq terminating diplomatic immunity for US service personnel - a decision that forced Obama into bringing the troops home.

In the weeks that followed, a frightened Siggi Thordarson contacts the US embassy in Reykjavík, while the Swedish police attempt to railroad two women who had slept with Assange into pursuing a rape allegation because they had been unhappy about his refusal to wear a condom or get tested for HIV. The case was dropped by the federal prosecutor and Assange returned to London. However, she then issued an arrest warrant and he surrendered himself to the Metropolitan Police. At this point, Spanish-Swedish lawyer Stella Moris joined the team assisting Assange and she recalls along with colleagues Stefania Maurizi and Sarah Harrison how dismayed they were by the behaviour of both Thordarson and Guardian investigations editor, David Leigh, who included the password to the stash of unredacted diplomatic documents in his 2011 book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.

John Young accessed the files and published them on his Cryptome website, complete with the unredacted names of active personnel, whose security had now been compromised. But the US media followed Washington's insistence that Assange was to blame, when he had withheld the documents in a bid to blackout the names of those in sensitive positions. Convinced that he would be extradited to the US, Assange broke his bail conditions to accept asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge. President Rafael Correra could find no reason not to protect Assange and he remained a guest in the tiny office while crowds gathered outside and the US allowed the UK to play the bad cop in seeking to dispatch the Australian to Stockholm to stand trial. He readily agreed to plead his innocence, providing he was safe from extradition to the United States. As no guarantee was forthcoming, he sat tight, with Quito being happy to help thwart Washington because of past attempts to interfere in Ecuadorian politics.

As the Obama administration sought evidence to prosecute, Thordarson was revealed to have molested several underage boys and to have stolen around $50,000 from WikiLeaks (whose revenue source had been blocked by a bank ban that included PayPal). Morris and Farrell can barely bring themselves to utter Thordarson's name, but he sticks by his right to ensure his own survival.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks published documents exposing how the Democratic Party has lobbied against Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election and Donald Trump seized upon the revelations while campaigning against Hilary Clinton. Suddenly, Assange was non grata among liberals, as it was presumed he had received the information from the Russians, who were bent on Trump getting into office. Once in power, however, Trump turned on journalism with his `fake news' agenda, although he sent Congressman Dana Rohrabacher to London to offer Assange a possible pardon in return for the name of the DNC source. He refused and, shortly afterwards, WikiLeaks published items exposing the CIA's Vault 7 hacking programme. This infuriated the White House and new director Mike Pompeo used his maiden speech to label WikiLeaks a terrorist organisation.

Pamela Anderson explains how Assange told her that he was being bugged inside the embassy and she had wondered if her friend was becoming paranoid after being confined for so long. However, Icelandic editor Kristinn Hrafnsson spotted a tweet offering material recorded covertly inside the embassy for €3 million. Negotiations resulted in the arrest of the extortionists, but any suggestion that Ecuador had betrayed Assange were dispelled when a man called `Cat-Cat' from the UC Global security firm called Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzón, and pointed out the company connection to Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino owner who was Trump's biggest backer and a close friend of Mike Pompeo.

No sooner had this threat been averted than Lenín Moreno assumes power in Ecuador and offers to do a deal with Trump to hand over Assange for $6.5 billion. This duly arrived in the form of an IMF loan and Correra was appalled that his successor had behaved so dishonourably. As Zach Dorfman uncovered discussions about kidnapping or killing Assange, UN torture assessor, Nils Melzer, was asked to investigate his living conditions inside the embassy, where the situation had been exacerbated by the fact that Moris had given birth to Assange's son, Gabriel.

After over six years in the embassy, Assange learned that the Swedes had dropped the rape case against him. However, he could still be arrested by the Met for breaching his bail conditions and cops were invited to seize him as part of Operation Pelican, which Sir Alan Duncan smugly asserts was brilliantly executed and neatly enabled the US to make a request for Assange's extradition. He mocks Assange for what he calls the `self-harm' he had inflicted upon himself in the embassy. Visiting him in Belmarsh Prison, Melzer had no doubt that he was suffering from the effects of torture and that being kept in solitary for 23 hours a day in a maximum security prison was inhumane.

When the extradition hearing begins in Woolwich, the US changes its tack to claim that Assange was a hacker not a publisher or a journalist. Having had a second son, Max, he married Moris in Belmarsh, where he suffered a mini-stroke and she claimed that the UK was conducting a public execution. President Biden continued with the case and Melzer quit his UN job because he felt it was pointless highlighting abuses when nothing is ever done about them. Naomi Klein states that Assange fell victim to a shift in the narrative, as the super-rich started seeking to control the news agenda to ensure that only their version of the `truth' was heard and they exploited social media to impose their mandate, whether they were in power in Hong Kong, Turkey, or the United States.

However, Jefferson continued shuttling back and forth to negotiate with the Americans because she had realised the weakness of a case that relied so heavily on evidence that Thordarson gave to save his own skin and now contradicts on camera. Eventually, in June 2024, Assange accepts that he might have contravened the Espionage Act, while believing himself to be compliant under the First Amendment. Once this plea had been entered, he was taken from Belmarsh to Stansted and put on a plane to Canberra. We see a clip from his press conference, in which he admits pleading to journalism and nothing more, before the film closes on shots of the family together on a beach.

It took five editors to piece together the archive clips that surround the talking-head contributions in this well-organised and laudably straightforward account of Julian Assange's ordeal. The narrative is complicated enough, so Jarecki wisely avoids flashy graphics or animated inserts that might have tempted a director less certain of the power of hard facts and simple truths. Edward Snowden sets the tone by averring that Assange isn't a plaster angel and others allude to his arrogance and occasional cruelty. But his courage is never in doubt nor is his conviction that the public has a right to know not only about what their government is doing in their name, but also what it is doing behind their backs. What makes the WikiLeaks revelations so striking is that they expose the hypocrisy, corruption, and megalomania at the heart of the world's superpower democracy and how the failure to address these issues has resulted in an a tilt at autocracy by a man who wouldn't know what to do with truth, if he even knew what it was.

The Democracts hardly emerge from this sorry tale with much to crow about. Nor do the UK, Sweden or post-Correa Ecuador. But the most damage is inflicted upon individuals like David Leigh and Sigurdur Thordarson, with the former not getting off as easily here as he did in Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate (2013), which was based on his shamefully careless book. What's most fascinating, though, is the way the conduct of business on the Internet has deteriorated in such a short space of time. The way in which humanity has wasted such a precious gift is deplorable. But the manner in which dark forces have used it to disseminate lies, commit crimes, slander opponents, and mislead the public is utterly depressing and leaves one shuddering at the thought of how AI could be harnessed to discriminate, subjugate, and eliminate within a few short years.

COLOSSAL WRECK.

Josh Appignanesi has been on a roll since he started to make himself the subject of his disarmingly astute documentaries. Since releasing The New Man (2016), he has examined his life with academic wife Devorah Baum and his bemused take on the changing world around him in Female Human Animal (2018) and Husband (2022). In My Extinction (2023), he turned the focus on his climate activism and he follows this up with Colossal Wreck, which takes him to the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates for the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Invited to COP28 to introduce a screening of My Extinction, Josh Appignanesi is anxious because he knows no one else at the event and his conscience pricks him at flying all that way for a 30-minute panel. However, the prospect of witnessing an oil state hosting an eco jamboree proved irresistible, even though Appignanesi would miss his son's 10th birthday during his five-day stay. Having spent the journey learning about Dubai's desert past, recent transformation, and techno-reliant future. he notes that there is no trace of the flash floods that had hit the city a couple of weeks earlier. Instead, he films a futuristic megalopolis from the window of the cab, whose driver says that tourists don't come in the summer because it's too hot. Nevertheless, the bid to create a future-proofed oasis continues apace.

Arriving at the hotel at midnight, Appignanesi was advised to seek food at the nearby mall. Dismayed by the familiarity of the brand names, he muses on the fact that lobbyists had arrived to cut oil deals and he wishes he had chosen a different time to have given up smoking, even though he is relieved to have kicked a habit whose cravings he equates with the workings of global capitalism. The next day, during a 45-minute drive to the venue, he films the passing skyscrapers and comments on the newness, efficiency, and safeness of a place that seems to stand outside time and leaves him feeling curiously weightless. Perhaps this giddiness led him to ride in a `women only' carriage on the train under the misguided impression that the sideways glances he was receiving related to a revival of his former jauntily solo-travelling self.

It's at this point that the narrating voice reveals itself to be a large language model clone of Josh Appignanesi. In conclusion, it states: `I disavow the original Josh and his entire time on this earth to date, and yet, in so saying, I feel nothing whatsoever...you cannot follow me here, your kind are doomed...please enjoy your remaining time.' The revelation is both chilling and wittily apposite, as the use of AI chimes in with Dubai's agenda going forward, while also commenting on the impact that such policies will have on the environment and the populations of the Global South.

Wandering the expo site, Appignanesi tries to resist feeling awed, as he is aware that dirty money has gone in creating this idyllic space. But the same is true of London and he ponders how imperialism keeps on reinventing itself in more invidious forms that are harder to pin down and counter. He attends speaker meetings and gazes at performances without quite knowing how they were supposed to help. A spectacular light show depicting marine life reminds him of the damage to the waters around the UAE that had been caused by the desalination plants that supply Dubai and he wonders why he has come when a bigwig approached about My Extinction was too busy to listen. Even hanging with some of the young activists who got the film invited makes Appignanesi feel like an outsider and not even their energy and optimism can convince him that the Green Zone will ever cause the Blue Zone to stop and think - because they think they're the good guys, too.

The day before his screening, Appignanesi films lots of exhibits and illuminated displays (all of which are slick and enticing) and uses them as a backdrop to his recollections of a workshop in which people had spent as much time debating gender-appropriate terminology as the issues of diverting funds from the Global North to make a meaningful difference elsewhere.

On the day of his screening, he meets some members of the Wisdom Keepers, a group of indigenous speakers who had come to testify about their regions. He fears them may be seen as gimmicky and would merely serve the purpose of making entitled people feel better about themselves for having listened with empathy. Appignanesi is disappointed by the turn out for his film, but is reassured that many more will be tuning into the panel discussion online. He meets Paul Goodenough, a comic-book artist who is entirely carbon neutral and who makes him feel guilty and under-committed. Following the Q&A, they experience an Escape Room together and go in search of some booze to drown Appignanesi's sorrows at feeling the screening had been a washout. They sang happy birthday to Devorah Baum down the phone, which makes him feel guiltier still, as well as socially inept because he's never the one to think of such simple, but touching gestures.

At a bar near the hotel, he plays darts for the first time and stops after scoring a bullseye. As they wander around the marina, fighting the notion that Dubai is a remarkable place in so many ways, he feels tipsy and wretched, while also feeling connected in a wave of common humanity with those other delegates who are trying to be heard and bring about change.

Feeling a need to sample some nature, Appignanesi heads for the beach the next morning, only to find the entire place is man-made. He's glad to hook up with Sophie Shnapp to discuss her views on what Cop is trying to achieve. She introduces him to a woman who lives off the grid in the English countryside and he feels inadequate because she had been speaking at meetings encouraging fairer treatment for farmers in the Global South and denouncing Big Agri companies to buy swathes of land while seeking to off-set their carbon footprint.

The afternoon leave Appignanesi eager to hear the Wisdom Keepers and he is not disappointed, as the testimony of Valdelice Veron, a woman in traditional dress from the Brazilian Guarani Kaiowa tribes, who speaks unflinchingly of land clearances, rape, and the violence perpetrated by the military and border police. She ends by singing a traditional song that leaves her in tears and she has to be consoled by the panel moderator. Sophie had said on the beach that political leaders and financial high-rollers needed to have this kind of immediate, intimate connection with those on the wrong end of their policies for things to change. But getting them to stop and listen is the problem.

Appignanesi wants to linger, but has been invited to a cocktail party with networking possibilities. En route, he is distracted by a Saudi Arabian exhibit with the world's largest LED screen and by the turnout at a screening of Josh Tickell's Bee Wild. Once again, cast into the glum depths, he feels uncomfortable at the hottest party in town and notes how better dressed and taller the men were in an inner sanctum event that had been sponsored by a Swiss bank. He runs into Paul and Sophie and enjoys hanging with the cool kids, but regrets drinking too much.

The next day, Appignanesi passes through the world's largest mall to reach its tallest structure. He sees the giant aquarium and relates this to a talk he had attended at which the audience had been invited to close their eyes and listen to the sound of whale talk. This plays over the views taken from the Burj Khalifa and Appignanesi wonders how much of this `gargantua of insignificance' would still be standing in 200 years time (the age to which some whales can live). The narrator quotes Percy Bysshe-Shelley's poem, `Ozymandias': "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

As he flew home, Appignanesi wondered whether COP28 had achieved anything, apart from being the first to mention fossil fuels in the finale communiqué. He shows footage of the flash floods that hit Dubai weeks after the conference ended and laments that humanity was too busy enjoying the benefits of untrammeled capitalism to give much thought to the end of days. Musing on how brightly human civilisation had burned, he feels depressed, but also grateful that the activists were still out there trying to alert the rest of us to the emergency. As he reaches home and the welcoming hugs of his kids, he concludes he has no option but to bash on and that seems an affirmative thing to do.

Shooting with an Osmo Pocket camera that gave him freedom to move and engage, Appignanesi has not only created a latterday classic in the `city symphony' mode with his snapshot of Dubai, but he has also nailed the reasons why the efforts to save the planet are falling on deaf ears or being denounced as scaremongering. His insights into the motivations of the COP delegates and those seeking to exploit the gathering to make behind-the-scenes deals that fly in the face of the conference agenda are both shrewd and incisive. But he is also astute in his judgement of the eco attendees and what they (like himself) are seeking to achieve on a personal level to raise their profile or gain admittance to charmed circles.

The integrity of the delegates should not be doubted and the decision to distance himself by employing an AI-generated narrator enables Appignanesi to be more serious than he has been in his earlier self-deprecating portraits. There are moments of edgy wit here, as well as some revealing instance of comic embarrassment. But the views expressed on both the environmental movement as a whole and on Appignanesi's contribution to it are both considered and cogent.

What's more, by editing his own footage and scripting his own commentary, Appignanesi has almost succeeded in creating a DIY documentary on a shoestring budget. Vik Sharma's tantalising score enhances the chimerical feel generated by the

artificial voice speaking with authenticity and uncertainty. Leaving viewers with plenty to think about and reasons to be both cheerful and fearful, this is an essential primer to the world we live in and the mess we are making of it.

ODYSSEY.

Gerard Johnson already has three impressive entries on his CV in the form of Tony (2009), Hyena (2014), and Muscle (2019). He has two-thirds of another one in Odyssey. However, a frustrating lack of imagination in the final reel undoes much of the good work.

Natasha Flynn (Polly Maberly) runs a small estate agency on a bustling London street, whose motto is `Live and Let Live'. Fleeing the dentist's after her card is refused following a £900 wisdom tooth extraction, she returns to the office to give faithful employees Safi (Kellie Shirley) and Spike (Charley Palmer Rothwell) a Monday rollicking in front of new intern Dylan Rose (Jasmine Blackborow). However, she turns on the charm when showing a young couple around an apartment and Dylan is impressed by the way Natasha pushes their buttons to coax them into a rental contract.

When they give a gay couple a tour of a large house, Natasha is even more deft in her pandering, as she butters up the more dubious partner (Tom Davis) into being enthusiastic about the let. Back at the office, however, she snaps at Spike for taking so long to set up an app to give Flynn's a global reach and she curses that she's not as out there as rival agent, Douglas Kelly (Ben Shafik). Nevertheless, she has ambitions and shows her staff their new premises en route to drinking and dancing the night away at a swanky bar.

Snorting coke back home to ease the pain from her tooth, Natasha ignores phone calls from her friend, Sophie, who is chasing an unpaid loan. The bank is also on Natasha's case, but she has high hopes of a merger with a super-agency run by the smarmy Dom (Daniel De Bourg). Not even a visit to the unlettable Calypso Farm in the wilds of Essex can dampen Natasha's spirits, as she schmoozes with Dan (Guy Burnet) at the bar in the hope that he can tide her over until her big payday. When he plays hard to get, she heads home with two bottles of wine and some stolen chocolate to deaden the pain.

Having been impressed by the way Dylan handled a couple seeing a `compact' property, Natasha takes her to lunch. However, she storms out after claiming to have found glass in her salad and her day goes from bad to worse when Dan calls in a favour. He and brother Will (Ryan Hayes) have kidnapped Daniel and want somewhere to hide him while they decide what to do with him. Appalled by their actions, Natasha realises she's trapped when Will takes her picture standing beside the battered Daniel. She persuades a cabby (Sallieu Sesay) to ferry her around a series of sleazy clubs in search of The Viking, who she hopes can bail her out of trouble.

With Thursday already going badly, after Natasha argues with Safi and Spike and Dom calls to withdraw from the merger, she is relieved to find a note on her desk setting up a meeting in a quiet pub with The Viking (Mikael Persbrandt). He tells her to go along with Dan and Will's plans and she agrees to let them dump Daniel at Calypso Farm. Lying on the pentagram drawn on the floor of an upstairs room, Natasha wonders how she has got herself into such a mess and realises how much danger she's in when she overhears the coke-fuelled Will declaring her disposable. Her plight threatens to get worse when Daniel jumps from the bathroom window, but he hurts his leg and needs lugging back indoors.

Friday dawns and Natasha stops at a callbox to tell Daniel's wife that he's safe. She meets The Viking at her apartment, where he lays out his weapons in preparation and discusses killing Natasha's father for battering her mother. However, she has always blamed her mother for what happened (and her antipathy still comes across during their tense phone calls). That anger comes out at the farmhouse, when Will and Dan arrive with a gaggle of goons and Natasha stabs one, while The Viking dispatches the others (setting one alight for good measure). He even has time to parade around the house with billowing pink flairs before ordering Natasha to send Dan to Valhalla.

Taking the opportunity to push a business proposal to Daniel, as she helps him downstairs, the bloodied Natasha stops off on the drive home to bludgeon her mother to death with a hammer on the doorstep of her luxury home. As the film ends, we see her celebrating with staff at her new agency and watch an advert for her service that comes complete with gushing testimonies from a satisfied couple who describe her in terms the previous 90 minutes have taught us to take with a pinch of salt.

Right up until the moment that Dan and Will abduct Daniel for no particular reason and with no endgame in mind, this capitalist parable had been a compelling and credible character study. Thenceforth, it becomes a tiresome exercise in stylised violence that is notable only for Jovan Adjer's sound design and the pulsing music of The The.

The latter are, of course, Matt Johnson, who is the director's brother, while Polly Maberly is his wife. She is superb, as the workaholic bristling with attitude, while fending off the various impending crises that threaten her little empire. The letting scenes are highly amusing, as is Natasha's expression when Dylan proves to be a natural. Maberly also impresses in her three conversations with Mikael Persbrandt, in which she admits to her vulnerability, while justifying her actions as the daughter of an unhappy home and as a modern woman who feels empowered by her ever-pinging phone. Yet, even she struggles to swing the bloodbath sequence, while it seems unlikely that Natasha would walk away from her mother's murder with a blood-caked face and her car parked outside the house.

Daniel's evident refusal to press charges against Natasha provides another instance of strained plausibility in Johnson and Austin Collings's screenplay. But the insights into the realities of the gentrified property market and those that manipulate it are cogent, as are the observations about money and the morality of its diverse sources. With Alan Gilmore's production design, Korsshan Schlauer's cinematography, and Ian Davies's editing all bolstering the shifts between hyper-realism and stylised carnage, this reinforces Johnson's reputation as British cinema's most distinctive unsung talent. His next picture will be keenly awaited.