Review of The Circle (2017) by Olivier B — 29 Jul 2017

Okay, finished the movie "The Circle". Here are some thoughts right after the final credit rolled.

This actually was Bill Paxton's last movie to be released.

Danny Elfman did the music! I did not know that. As my friends know, I'm a soundtrack music fan, so I notice the music a lot. And I didn't know that Danny Elfman was into electronica, which is what he did for this film. Ambient poppy synth electronica. It was kinda WarGames meets Trent Renzor's music on "The Social Network", but lighter.

The movie was actually made and shot in California. If you don't pay attention to these things, you might not know what a rarity this is these days. It confirmed a bit about the financing for the movie, which I'll get to in a moment, because whoever was paying for it didn't care about optimizing their costs...As normal big cast Hollywood films do...And little indies too.

The Politics of Movie Making: The Money and The Theme:

Keep in mind that this is a movie with an A-List (sorta) cast. However, when the producer credits start to roll at the start of the film, you'll notice that it's produced by over seven production companies! Most of which you've probably never heard of before. I only recognized two. What the heck?

Today, most big feature films are now financed in Hollywood with the help of Chinese money. Thus the themes of the movie, and often the content, is shaped and tuned by that participation. However "The Circle" is financed by Saudi money. Yep, it had to go to the Middle East to find its financing.

It made me wonder why until I started understanding the themes of the movie; privacy, surveillance, democracy, elite classes, political corrupton, government accountability, a toxic view of social media, and invasive connected consumer electronics technology.

Basically, almost all of those themes drove away the Chinese money. (This movie was also not released in China.) And the usual Hollywood financiers didn't want to piss off their new Silicon Valley new media and distribution overlords with the movie's finger-wagging moralizing.

The movie itself? It's kind of a good Bad Movie. There are some eye-rolling moments that are unintentionally funny. The thing is broad and obvious in what it's trying to say; Social Media bad! Your privacy is dead! Cell phone users are a zombie cult! It's all Social Justice politics meets "1984"...With Drones!!!

The talent is mostly wasted. Tom Hanks should have been more mad and confrontational. John Boyega is just a prop...They always have him standing off in a corner somewhere looking at a cell phone most of the time. And Emma Watson is okaaay? It's hard to tell if she's at the limit of her range in this movie or she's just shackled by the dumb script or the direction.

But her character is part of a huge but interesting flaw in the film's building of her character and the story. When she gets her new job at "The Circle" (think of it as a stereotypical mash-up of what detractors think about Google, Facebook, and Apple), she's at first surprised, and then meekly going along to get along with all of the company's amazingly brash privacy invading products...while soaking up the company benefits to help her sick father (Bill Paxton), with a worried look on her face about the implications and the cultish behaviors of her co-workers. She's put off by the fact that the company is injecting tracking chips into the bones of children!

But suddenly by the third act, she's ALL IN, and you think "Ohhh, she's being sneaky...She's setting up the baddies for a fall...". But no! She's ALL IN because she's actually all in. She's all in for not only taking down the bad guys that she voluntarily let destroy her life and kill a guy she kinda liked, but she actually is all in for making the company's philosophy and power even stronger!

By the final frames of the film's very ambiguous ending, "The Circle" has either been rid of its over-reaching executive staff and she's back to a somewhat normal life, or that she's probably the new CEO and the most powerful social media goddess / leader on the planet! (Hovering drones over her in the final shots let you know that the later is probably true.).

John Boyega's character, the guy who actually created most of the stuff that "The Circle" was founded on, is nowhere to be found...Check the darkened corners or staircases. You'd think he would have benefited from the executive shuffle...But the film gives you the feeling that he's not the kind of guy to step-up that way despite his rebellion against his partners and egging Emma's character on.

In the end, Emma Watson's character apparently turns the entire world into an episode of "Black Mirror", the popular and great "the Internet is bad and alienating" TV series.

In terms of the production, the movie looks nice and its depiction of computer interfaces and technology is relatively tight. The only shaky sci-fi part being the little stick-up, smaller than a human eyeball, cameras that are delivering HD video and are supposed to be satellite connected. The movie's story hinges on these little things. But there's no mention of how those little things are powered and able to do all of that HD video, processing, analysis, and uplink.

Regarding the depiction of technology (and the movie's theme), the lead consultant for the film is listed as Jaron Lanier, a guy who is a rather prominent and eccentric personality in the history of personal computing and Silicon Valley. He's kinda known for hating technology, the very thing that made him wealthy enough to live a life of a techno-hippy hating technology. So he'd dig the themes of the movie for sure.

But that's it. Those are my jumbled thoughts after watching the movie. Was I entertained? Yeah, it was a fun movie to watch. But keep in mind, I'll often watch bad movies just to see where they went wrong. Is it a good movie? Oh, no. Not at all. It's a lot of wasted acting talent and theme potential.

The movie seemed to want to be about a horrible cult of technology spreading its live privacy-be-damned experience tendrils across the earth that must be stopped! But it doesn't play as directly as it should have. Instead, it spends two thirds moralizing about how bad it all is through the main character, until she suddenly embraces it all inexplicably and amplifies it in the final act. It's a twist...But it just didn't make sense. They didn't develop why she suddenly went over to the dark side.

In 1998, in Japan, there's was a much better story made along many of the same themes. It's a striking anime TV series called "Serial Experiments Lain". Watch that instead. It's a classic with real artful thought and talent behind it. Come to think of it...Emma Watson might have made a good Lain! Hmmm.

Or watch "Black Mirror" on Netflix too! It's a fun "Twilight Zone" for the Internet age. Doing constantly what "The Circle" seemed to aspire to be.