Review of The Circle (2017) by Austin D — 12 Jul 2017

(This review will contain spoilers, so if you are planning on seeing The Circle, please be warned).

I was excited when I first saw the trailer for The Circle. Being a big fan of Black Mirror, I love the idea of an almost idyllic future that is being overrun by technology, the trailer seemed to show an idea similar to this, a Facebook like social networking program that monitors every aspect of your life. If the film had stayed on this train of thought, I think it could have done a much better job at showing a world that we may be heading to. The problem is, though, that it tries to be so many things, all while failing at all of them.

I would describe the plot, but there isn't one. Emma Watson's Mae is barely a protagonist, there is no antagonist and there's no conflict to speak of. Every now and then there will be a little nugget of plot that you think might go somewhere, but ultimately doesn't do anything to progress the lack of story and then the movie just ends.

I want to say that the film has a message, but I'm not sure anyone working on the film could tell you what it was. You would think a film about a world where there is no privacy would be pro-privacy, but at the end of the movie nothing has changed. There's no goal that Mae is working towards. She becomes a celebrity after going "transparent" (wearing a camera 24/7, and broadcasting her daily life to billions of people) but this act isn't demonized at all. She directly causes the death of a former friend, Mercer, and that causes her to take off the camera, but she's back to wearing it again five minutes later, making you question whether the film has any message at all, or even if Mae has learned any kind of lesson. She sees what a time without privacy can cause, and then goes on to expose the entire lives of Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt's characters, effectively solving nothing. Karen Gillian somehow has a more defined character arc and she's an inconsequential character that takes up a total of 20 minutes of screen time.

Tom Hanks is in the film as the analogue to a Steve Jobs-esque tech guru. The movie feels like it's building him up as an antagonist, but then he doesn't exactly do anything against Mae. If anything, Mae does more as an antagonist than any other character. She burns bridges with friends, gets a childhood friend killed, and shows so little remorse that you question whether she cares at all.

The Circle wastes every single big name actor that's in it's cast. John Boyega doesn't look like he even wants to be there for most of his scenes, and he's still somehow the best performance. I don't blame the cast at all for any of their performances, they're all immensely talented and have showed that in their other films, all of the problems lie on the directing and writing. The actors just don't have anything to work with. There are actors that could be cut out of the film entirely and absolutely nothing would change, for instance both Karen Gillian and Patton Oswalt are so inconsequential to the plot that it's confusing as to why they're even there.

There were shots that were so badly composed that you wouldn't be able to tell who the actual actors were if you couldn't hear them speaking. There's a scene between Emma Watson and Ellar Coltrain which is shot from behind glass windows from what feels like more than 20 feet away. It holds this shot for a solid 30 seconds, before cutting to a very similar shot from inside the building. There doesn't seem to be a reason for either of the shots, other than to show off the set. The area that they're in, the lobby of one of The Circle's primary building, also apparently has very little foot traffic, because there are an astoundingly few people walking around, making it feel like a wasteland.

The deeper the film gets into it's premise, the less believable it actually is. They start out as a mostly simple social networking site that people share their daily lives on. Nothing major. This somehow gets spun into the website being used to run elections for entire countries. This is developed and implemented exactly two scenes, then never brought up again. While Mae is in her transparent phase, and in what I guess is the resolution of the film, it's said that a billion people are watching the events unfold live. This is such an absolutely ludicrous number, that it takes you out of the movie completely (if you already aren't). After a quick Google search, approximately 3.6 billion people on Earth have access to the internet. That's about 40% of Earth's population, if a third of the people with internet access are watching the live feed from Mae's camera, that means that roughly 13% of the entire planet's population is watching it live. The record for most viewed television broadcast was the 2008 Summer Olympics which had around 5 billion people at some point in the event. That's not even 5 billion watching at once, that's 5 billion people watching at some point over the course of the event. If 1 billion people were watching Mae's live feed, it would most likely be the highest rated simultaneous viewing of anything in history. In an age where things like YouTube and Twitch exist, it isn't hard to look at how many people are watching a person stream their life, if the movie wants to exaggerate, fine, but take the most popular streamer on Twitch, multiply it by ten and you still won't get anywhere near a billion. Heck, multiply it by a hundred and you still probably won't get close.

For a movie with a premise about knowing everything, I'm not sure anyone knew what they were trying to say, and it's really disappointing, because there could have been so much more done with this premise.