Good evening ladies and gents, hope your week is going smooth as eggs. Today we will be reviewing The Circle. I actually saw this movie a few weeks ago but I needed to digest it so I could make sense of what I watched. So without further ado, let’ get to it.
PLOT
The movie centers around Mae Holland who gets the chance to better he life when her friend Annie gets he an interview with The Circle. A company that fuses Facebook and what Google+ was trying to be together. Led by Eamon Baily (Tom Hanks), the company pushes the boundaries of how we view privacy and the impact having everything open can have on the world. With breakthrough after breakthrough, the company skyrockets with the help of Mae by implementing new dynamic to both help people and capture criminals. But when thing sound too good to be true Mae begins to question if somethings should be left private from the world to protect one’s self and see the dark secrets the company holds within it.
CAST
Mae Holland played by Emma Watson, a young woman in a deadend job who gets a break working for The Circle. Annie played by Karen Gillian, is the best friend to Mae and is responsible for the rise in Mae’s career. Tom Stenton and Eamon Baily are played by Patton Oswalt and Tom Hanks respectively, they are the founder of The Circle. Ellar Coltrane plays Mercer, Mae’s former boyfriend and John Boyega plays Ty Lafitte, the brains behind The Circle. The late Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly play Vinnie and Bonnie Holland, parents of Mae.
SET-PIECES
After Mae gets the job at The Circle, she learns how the people work and the routines she must undertake. She meets Ty at a company party and gets the first vibe of something being wrong at the company. The company learns about Mae’s father’s health condition and decides to put them on her health plan, but this comes with a massive price. The Circle places cameras in their home to monitor them. The second set-piece happens when Mae, feeling frustrated with the job, goes canoeing in the middle of the night. Breaking into the canoe shop and going out on the water alone, she loses control and almost drowns. The Circle, placing hidden cameras in major cities around the world, takes note of this incident and ends up saving her life based on knowing where she was.
This causes Mae to confess her actions in front of the whole company and prompts her to go “Transparent”. Having every move she makes live to the world. The third set-piece comes when a new breakthrough is released called Soul Search, a software used to find people anywhere in the world. Mae gets pressured into searching for Mercer, due to public outcry and cyber-bullying is gone into hiding. He i found and is chased down on the highway, which leads to his live death. This causes Mae to lose all confidence in the company for its invasion of privacy, causes her parents to go into hiding themselves, and shows her what the priority of the company. The final set piece comes when Mae discovers the wrong deeds the founders are involved in and pressures them into going Transparent. This was seen as the best way she could avenge Mercer’s death and show that people’s privacy should be respected.
CONCLUSION
This felt like a PBS broadcast that was telling me something I already knew about my own privacy and how to be accountable. Absolutely privacy has to be respected and we deserve to keep certain information to ourselves. I saw what this movie was inadvertently doing in creating dialogue for the obvious. Living in a world where people film themselves doing who knows what and putting it on the internet to people who have an online profile and updates it but doesn’t put too much out their for the world to see. We have two spectrums out there, one that respects their privacy and the other not giving a crap. The movie though is informative but fails to realize a majority of people know how to keep themselves off the grid and that not everyone is so dense to not know how to protect themselves. Maybe this movie should have been aimed to an older audience who are ignorant to how the internet works, but who know. Overall informative but boring.
RATING
I ultimately give this movie a 2 out of 5. You will learn something and see the ins and outs of a company like Microsoft or Apple, learning how that world operates and how competitive it is. But the movie drags on for far too long, Tom Hanks isn’t in it too much, and the tone is too depressing. Super feminist Emma Watson to me will always be Hermione because I feel that role, though the past, was her career defining role. But hey maybe he can focus on her HeforShe organization and try again with a different type of movie. The depressing vibe movie is not her thing to me. Just my opinion.
Anyway guys thank you so much for checking out our review of The Circle. Maybe most of you will enjoy it but to me it wasn’t wort the $8.50 I spent to see this misleading and boring movie. Just feel bad for Mercer but that really is about it. Our next review will be King Arthur so stay tuned. Have a good one and take it easy!
Xagon Speaks 