Review of The Circle (2017) by James R — 30 Dec 2018

Wow. This one....this one was something else. This was so bad that if I wasn't drinking an iced coffee at 10:30pm at night there's no way I woulda stayed awake for this one. The circle follows a young lady named Mae (Emma Watson) who recently gets hired at The Circle.

The Circle is like a mix of Facebook/Twitter/any tech company you can name. They have recently released a series of small cameras that basically can be placed anywhere which in turn gives the Circle date on everything from people's habits to how well traffic works, etc.

Mae loves her new job and eventually gets in well with the CEO of the company Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) and the COO Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt). Eamon and Tom convince Mae to go "translucent" which means she wears a camera 24/7 and shares every aspect of her life with her viewers and followers through The Circle social media app.

This soon complicates things as Mae's life is put on blast isolating her from her friends and family. One of The Circle's creators Ty (John Boyega) warned her about how The Circle is not all what it seems.

Soon Mae realizes that the power that The Circle has is much darker than it seems. That's me piecing together the plot of this film. It just doesn't work. Emma Watson is normally great, but her character is super unlikeable here.

Tom Hanks does great, but man he's in maybe 10 minutes total in this movie. The pace of this movie is terribly slow. It just doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a suspenseful film? A mystery film? Nope nothing even happens until the last twenty minutes of the film and I am not even exaggerating that.

The film's subplot with Ty should have been the focus. But it's barely even something thats touched upon. Ty as a character is wasted and this could have been the twist to everything. Also I gotta mention this Mae's childhood friend Mercer is played by Ellar Coltrane.

While I enjoyed Coltrane in Boyhood (2014) this dude cannot act to save his life in this movie. He literally sounds like he's just saying lines. It's actually kind of hilarious and I found myself laughing during times that should have been dramatic.

This is a movie to avoid at all costs. There's nothing redeemable here and I found no entertainment value from it what so ever. I didn't care about a single character and I while I thought this was going to be my final film of 2018 I don't want to end with a true dumpster fire, so expect at least one more film before Monday!