I didn't mind The Circle, but I didn't really enjoy it either, and I am going to say that the fault here needs to be shared between the pair of us. The film doesn't quite do enough with the main ideas it is working with, but I may have enjoyed it a bit more if I'd watched it back when it was first made available in 2017. The intervening years have simply shown us more and more reasons to distrust tech-bros and offensively rich and powerful individuals, which makes The Circle much less tense and more predictable than it would have been in a world before people like Bezos and Musk started to act increasingly like parodies of James Bond villains.
Emma Watson plays Mae, a young woman who is helped in to a dream job by her friend, Annie (Karen Gillan). She ends up in the Circle, a tech company that has seemingly unlimited power and resources. It's a bit odd though, considering how people are encouraged to interact online and fully commit to the Circle way of life. The pill is sugar-coated by the big boss, Bailey (Tom Hanks), who can acknowledge how silly some of their practices appear, but continues to present his vision of a tech-reliant utopia in a way that is convincingly benign. Some start to worry about the implications, however, as the Circle starts to reach further and further into the lives people all around the world.
Based on a novel by Dave Eggers, this was adapted from page to screen by a pairing of the writer and director, James Ponsoldt. Eggers has worked on other movies, and Ponsoldt has a mixture of projects in his filmography (with his best work being made for the small screen), but none of them manage to find the best way to handle this material. What should be a standard dream-turns-sour scenario, with the added threat of super-charged tech to make things more complicated, is turned into a disappointingly dull drama in which things go quite well for many of the characters . . . until they stop being so blissfully naïve. The biggest problems stem from the way things are plotted, but it doesn't help that the cast is relatively weak.
As much as I enjoy Emma Watson, she hasn't quite managed to convince in any of her post-Potter main roles, despite trying her hand in an interesting variety of projects. She's not bad here, but she's also not a strong enough screen presence, and is outshone by almost every supporting cast member (including Gillan, Hanks, Patton Oswalt, John Boyega, and Glenne Headly and Bill Paxton, who do wonderful work in the role of her parents). Mind you, few of those people I just mentioned are the best people for their roles either. Gillan has to overdo a heap of nervy paranoia throughout the second half, Hanks seems far too nice to have reached his position in life, and Oswalt isn't given enough screentime to make his character anything more than an obvious schemer who does some hand-wringing and metaphorical wiping of his damp brow as the plot heads toward the final scenes. Boyega does well, but his relatively small role here feels as if it doesn't deserve his talents.
It's ironic that I'll be sharing this review around in the usual places, ensuring that it ends up in certain social media spots, linking to it on IMDb, and potentially making some money from clicks that are generated via Google. Considering what the film posits, maybe I am part of the problem. Okay, I admit it, I am definitely a part of the problem. We all are, but many of us are savvy enough to shape our own corner of the internet to exactly how we want it to be, with the help of ad-blockers, data usage options, and ongoing attempts to balance out the negatives with more positives. There are very few legitimately good options nowadays when it comes to conscientiously maintaining an online presence. But at least I can use this platform to belatedly warn you against wasting your time with The Circle. It's not terrible, but it never manages to become more than harmlessly dull and average.
4/10
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