The Circle: A Film You Need Never See

The Circle is most definitely the film you never want to see. Here is why.

You are often asked to go to the theater, suspend disbelief and shut your brain off for a few hours and tell yourself “hey, it’s just a movie.” The problem with films like the circle is that they masquerade as truth. What appears on the screen is not for dramatic, it is supposed to be saying something, it is expected to have a point.

This is the frustrating point about a movie like The Circle; it does have one. But you see it all in the trailer, the entire plot is revealed. With nothing to see last weekend, I took a chance and ignored the 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Also, because there was the same female lead as in Beauty and the Beast, it was an easy sell for my date.

Under the category of I don’t know why she is so famous, Emma Watson for me pretty much sits right on top of that. She is still exuding the same flat, listless, range of garbage non-emotion that children trying to emulate adults tend to do. Except that Emma Watson was supposed to have grown out of that by now. She grew up on set with Harry Potter, and you could forgive her there. She is asking to be taken seriously, but it is near impossible to do so because she only has an insufficient range of faces when she is acting. I especially despise the “I am upset, but look like I am constipated brow furrow look. You are simply aware the entire time that she is “acting” and that results in all the actors on the screen being just as wooden as she is.

There are just too many plot points in this disaster of a film to mention how ridiculous they are. Apparently, they all stem from a script that simply did not fact check their technology statements. “Soul Search,” find anyone in the world anywhere, in 20 minutes, what? An HD camera that is the size of a BB putting out full screen, uncompressed full HD video with a perfectly flat and crystal clear image is possible? Drinking a tub of green smoothie and then all of a sudden there are microbes and sensors swimming about your body reporting everything medically you would ever need to know back to you. A single company having all of this tech, all figured out, all perfect that can cure any problem wants to collect data on everyone for some nefarious purpose that you wait for the entire film to find out.

Emma’s character decides to go transparent, meaning she wears cameras on herself all day long and it reports everything back to everyone. And apparently, she has millions of follows and agrees to do it, not see the privacy considerations or issues with it until she accidentally uses the Soul Search app in front of millions of people to find her friend who does not want to be found. He is so terrified of being seen on camera by millions that he drives his truck over a bridge. Only then does it feel “wrong” to her. She is a help desk worker and yet she becomes critical to the entire companies future? What?

Tom Hanks is worthy of a mention, only because after my review of Inferno, I thought that Hanks could not do any worse. He just doesn’t care in this role at all. His final lines are more for the audience than his character. He says “we’re fucked” after he is asked to go “transparent,” but he does not realize that anyone going to see this film is the ones that are.

There is an obvious, ironic reason why this movie was called The Circle. It starts the way that it begins and no matter at the point you walk into watching this burning dumpster fire of a film, it will still make no sense to you as to why they made the film in the first place. Avoid at all costs.