The Circle

Year: 2017
Genre: Drama
Directed: James Ponsoldt
Stars: Emma Watson, John Boyega, Ellar Coltrane, Glenne Headly, Bill Paxton, Karen Gillan, Tom Hanks, Nate Corddry, Mamoudou Athie, Patton Oswalt, Smith Cho, Amir Talai, Judy Reyes
Production: Imagenation Abu Dhabi

The Circle based on a novel by Dave Eggers, is not only the name of the film and the name of the company in which the film is largely set in. The Circle can also describe the hole in which this movie tries to plug its square pegged characters, story and themes. For all its gauche, ill-conceived judgments of cyber-life and West Coast utopianism, The Circle seems not only doomed to be forgotten but berated and mocked by generations of computer engineers tickled pink by its uninformed perspective. Think the same reaction one would have of Hackers (1995) only replace Matthew Lillard's easy-going silliness with John Boyega awkwardly shuffling through the darkness.

If there's a silver-lining to this Phishing-scam made sentient it's all in the naive gaze of Emma Watson's character who stops just short of selling herself as "real." Watson plays Mae, a millennial graduate who through luck and gumption comes to work for a Google/Facebook/Apple analog whose workplace culture would make any normal person worry about the Kool-Aid. After a laundry list of new-kid-on-the-block cliches, the story settles on Mae's emergence into the all-encompassing world of her job, which cajoles her to be a guinea pig in a new kind of social media.

The Circle seems like it should be a pitch black satire on the dark side of Silicon Valley. Yet what it ends up being is a dull, incredulous parody of what people outside Silicon Valley think of people in Silicon Valley. No where is this more obvious than in the casting of Tom Hanks whose borrowed credibility feeds into the idea that cyberspace hides wolves in sheep's clothing. We want to trust his tech-billionaire Emon Bailey; even as he spouts the most outrageous, nonsensical phrases like he's complimenting a neighbors new car. Once we get to Ellar Coltrane's half-thought-out lectures on how things ought to be, the movie has gone so far up it's own a** that its brain is melting in stomach acid.

Visual metaphor for this movie...

What pains me is most of The Circle's various elements is it could have, should have, and needed to be way better. We have become a culture so dulled by the desire for convenience that most of us don't care internet companies buy and sell our personal information for the sake of better marketing and social conditioning. So long as I get my music to play on my Amazon Echo who cares if some murderer's most painful moment is immortalized on social media?

Whether on purpose or on accident, Mae talks a big game about "having a choice" but rarely makes a choice without coercion. That could have been an interesting theme. Yet because The Circle is aiming to be A Face in the Crowd (1957) for the Youtube generation, no matter what choices she ends up making there's an immediate and negative consequence. Mae along with the audience is seemingly trapped in a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. A stolen kayak gives Emon the fuel to pursue his Orwellian fantasies, a boardroom brainstorm gets Mae to further abandon her authentic self in favor of a less-real social personality. Hell even her seemingly unrehearsed answers to interview questions get her the job, that sends her on a spiral of ruination in the first place! Thus when the ending rears it's ugly, insincere, vacuous head (apparently the ending of the book is different) we all automatically assume things aren't going to resolve themselves.

In a world of nothing but accountability, is there really a need for integrity? This is a question I thought to myself while watching The Circle and sadly it's an idea that was never explored. Nor was there any followup on The Circle's apparent monopoly on practically everything on the interwebs (surely there are other virtual supervillains in Silicon Valley angling for world domination). Nope: boring characters, circular logic and techno-phobic platitudes are all you get here. All set to a soundtrack that sounds like the Blue Man Group underwater.

Final Grade: F