Documentary Filmmaker Laura Poitras ("Citizenfour" (2014) follows up that Oscar Winner with this "Julian Assange", "Wikileaks" Exploration and it is a Mess. Suffering from a Number of Outside Influences the Film became even More Messy after its Initial Release. It was pulled and Re-Edited and Re-Released.

The Movie is Confusing, Scattered, Lacks Focus and can cause Headaches trying to Follow the Themes or the Intent. It Plays like a Crazy Women's Quilt. Even more so if You are Unfamiliar with the Players or the Subjects Presented in a Haze of Haphazard History. Keeping Things Straight as the Film Unfolds is a Daunting Task.

It Hops and Flops all over the place. Locations and Points of Interest Covered are so Random it Feels like a Treasure Hunt and the "X" is Never Found. It moves here and there and Never Settles. Nothing is very Clear. Ambiguity Reigns, and those Seeking Insight or Truth about any of this will be Disappointed.

The Soap Opera Elements Overtake the Political and the Historical and it almost Devolves into a "People Magazine" Kind of Thing. Surely the Intentions were anything but. But in the End that's what it Feels Like. The Movie got Spoiled somewhere, sometime along the way and the Restoration to Something Palatable was Unsuccessful.

Sometimes timing is everything - so while this seems an apt time to watch a documentary about Assange (with him being arrested and all), the movie itself suffers from that. Now I hear you saying, they are not at fault, which is true. You should not "punish" the filmmakers for this weird twist of events.

But you cannot let this just slide and not even mention it. Also it is tough to get a grasp of the whole situation. The documentary struggles with Assange and him not being something the viewer can really understand. Which is evident when you realize that even Assange isn't "happy" with the outcome. Now that alone would be a badge of honor for other documentaries, but it would have been nice to know more, to get more feedback from Assange himself. Towards the end there is almost something there in an interview ... but the viewer is left again to think it through and make up their own mind. Not a bad documentary by a long shot and some will love this more than others, but there is so much more here and we only scratched the surface - kudos to an amazing beginning by the way, which sucks you all the way in - unfortunately this doesn't hold up for the whole thing

The ability of whistle-blowers to leak sensitive, and even secret, information is an essential check on the potential abuse of power by government. But Julain Assange, founder of Wikileaks, a website established to assist such whistle-blowers, is a deeply problematic figure: an egoist who falls out with his own collaborators with amazing frequency; a man who seemed hardly to take accusations of rape seriously; an instinctive anarchist who sometimes seems to be fighting not government tyranny everywhere, but exclusively in America. This documentary was conceived as a friendly venture (in fact, the film-maker quietly reveals she is not exactly a neutral party in the story), but the essential vanity of Assange is clearly on display. Ultimately, it's hard to avoid concluding that whatever good Wikileaks might have done has been fatally compromised by the man at its core.