Review of Circle (2015) by Kai L — 06 Jan 2016

This movie was just atrocious. Why? Awesome premise. Great atmosphere. Wonderful camera work. Excellent sound mixing. But horrible, and I mean HORRIBLE writing, characters and acting. I was so into this movie for the first, say... five minutes. It sucks you right in with legitimately creepy and ominous opening. But that all quickly goes downhill once the characters start... er... speaking.

I can't even tell you how incredibly annoyed I was by every line of dialogue in this movie. Right from the very start, it was nothing but cliché after cliché, and that continued throughout the whole film. And the characters were painfully cliche as well. Every single one of them is a stereotype of a stereotype. None of them are interesting or relatable, and the few that seem like they COULD have been get killed off before you can make a connection with them. And it's honestly freaking ridiculous how, without any clues or hints, within the first twenty minutes of the movie, they SOMEHOW figured out exactly what was going on, how to play the game, that it even WAS a game, that aliens have abducted all mankind and every single human being on earth is going through this exact same thing right now. What a sting of lucky guesses, huh?

Now, wait. Aliens are involved in this? Well, that sounds cool and something that's certainly worth exploring more! Right? Well, apparently the movie didn't think so, because they just barely glance over that part. Yeah, the most interesting part of this movie is barely even mentioned, and when it is, it's done WAY too early and the way they discuss it is like "Oh, yeah. It was aliens. Eh... Better figure out who I'm gonna vote to kill next.".

OH, but we haven't even got to the best part yet! You know, the part we ALL wait for in every suspenseful, supposedly scary movie - the part where everybody stands around and talks about their social and political view points!

Now, doesn't that sound exciting?!

I'm not kidding either. They literally spend a good 80% of this freakin' movie just jumping from one hot-button topic to another. They touch on every single thing. Racism, religion, immigration, homophobia - everything! And you know what? That's okay! There's nothing wrong with that. These are important issues that should be discussed and explored, and film along with other kinds of art can be great ways of doing that. This movie, however, is a great example of the completely WRONG way to do that. I guess I get what it's trying to do, it's TRYING to be insightful, it's TRYING to be thought-provoking... but it just fails miserably. I mean, the way they go about talking about this stuff is the most ridiculous, stereotypical crap I've ever heard. There is no subtly, there is no nuance, it's all just in-your-face preachy. Not only that, it's the same cliched arguments we've heard over and over again - so much point to where it's beating on the proverbial dead horse of cliche's so much it should have just given up and become a satire. In fact, that probably would have been a much better movie.

It's kind of baffling, honestly. For a movie that it's whole idea is, or at least seems to try to be, revolving around human nature and morality, it doesn't even come CLOSE to doing it correctly or realistically. It does every single thing completely wrong. You simply cannot explore the complexities of humanity if you do not have good writing and complex, three dimensional characters. A couple other reviewers said that it felt like watching a bad reality show, and I think that is spot on - which also explains why this movie annoyed me so much I almost got up and shut it off five or six times. On the whole, it basically just a boring crap fest of stereotypes talking about stereotypes, with a few sci-fi/horror elements thrown in to make you THINK it's going to be good and scary. But it's not. It's not scary, it's not suspenseful... Hell, it's not even interesting. It's just a boring, unfocused mess that can't decide what kind of movie it wants to be and with writers who, frankly, I'm not even sure how they have jobs. Disappointing, uninspired and unpleasant. So unless you want something to put you to sleep, or just want to relive every obnoxious sociopolitical facebook argument you've ever avoided for some reason, don't bother with this one.