REVIEW:
The Circle has an interesting enough premise, about a Google-like technology company that is about monitoring people all the time. They use drones, but they have these little spheres that are actually cameras. The sphere can be placed on anything and stick to anything. And they come in all different colors including clear and camouflage, so that you would never know they are there.
Th movie follows Mae (Emma Watson,) as she works a meaningless job answering phones and trying to get the right amount of money from people who have underpaid for things with a check. Soon she gets the interview of a lifetime when a friend, Annie (Karen Gillan, from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies,) puts her name forward and recommends her. Mae goes through a fun interview with unique questions and pretty soon she is hired.
At the company, we meet CEO Bailey (Tom Hanks,) who goes on stage in front of all the employees at the company once a week, on Fridays, to show off the latest and greatest ideas and inventions of the company. Mae tries to keep to herself for a little while, but soon finds that the company expects her to do way more than she is doing, and it has very little to do with work. When she goes home to see her parents for a weekend, she comes back to a bombardment of questions from other employees about her lack of social media presence over the weekend. It feel very much like a Black Mirror episode at times, and that’s a good thing.
The problem is, there really isn’t a clear villain or threat here. Yes, things get extreme when a friend of Mae’s, Mercer, gets targeted by online bullies who start calling him a deer killer, but none of these bullies gets a name or a face, and we are left with society as the bad guy. There is one climactic moment when Mae volunteers Mercer to have cameras locate him, and things don’t go so well as a result, but other than that, nothing really happens in this movie.
And that leads us to an ending where the movie tries to make more of something that what is actually there. It tries to throw the big CEOs under the bus and act like they were villains that need to exposed, but their actual “crimes,” are never explained. The most we get is that they had private email accounts that even their wives didn’t know about. Which means what? That they exchanged messages in privacy? It’s obviously meant to imply that they were up to some kind of illegal activity, but with no more details than this, we never get a clue of what that activity is, or if it even really happened. The movie needed more of a villain and more of a threat. It had a solid premise about social media takeover, but didn’t deliver the way it needed to.