How Would You Describe “The Circle” to Your Grandmother?

“The chaos of the web made elegant.” The “chaos” that is this film is anything but “elegant.”

Daniel Roeder, Movie Critic|May 2, 2017

Emma Watson stars in the disappointing “techno thriller”

Recently, I’ve been watching a show called Black Mirror. It’s basically a modern version of The Twilight Zone that deals with issues of modern technology. It’s a great series that I was reminded of while watching The Circle. The Circle is like an episode of Black Mirror mixed with one of those countless, bland, dystopian YA novels. I’m struggling as I write this to think of anything positive to say about this film. It’s pretty much terrible on every level.

I guess I’ll start off with the cast. Emma Watson cannot, and should not, attempt to do an American accent. There’s no reason for it, and while it isn’t quite as awful as say, Jason Statham’s hilarious American accent, it’s still distracting. The other big flaw with the cast is Ellar Coltrane, he’s the kid from Boyhood who to my knowledge isn’t really an actor. He’s atrocious in this, though his laughably bad performance does provide some of the only interest in this black hole of entertainment. Tom Hanks, John Boyega, and Patton Oswalt all have parts that are too small to even warrant a complaint. It’s a shame that this was the final onscreen appearance of Bill Paxton; his last scene is so bizarre and unexpected though that I’d almost call it going out on a high note. Game over man, indeed.

The problems with the film run far deeper than the acting though. There is no conflict in this story. It seems at the beginning that maybe the company Emma Watson goes to work for is darker than it seems on the outside, but no they’re pretty open about being shady and nobody seems to take issue with that. There’s one scene where John Boyega reveals himself to be the apparently missing founder of a Facebook-like company. Surely this will be an important plot point? It’s not, and I don’t even think he gets any lines for the rest of the movie. Emma Watson begins wearing a device that live streams her life online, which her friend Karen Gillan is not pleased with. She starts to rebel against the company, but just sort of disappears after a while. There’s the looming threat of a Congresswoman who wants to shut down The Circle, the internet corporation Emma Watson gets a job at, that goes nowhere. Lots of set ups with very few payoffs.

All of the ideas in the movie have been done before, and with much better execution. The commentary in the film doesn’t build to anything substantial. It seems to flip flop back and forth on whether or not privacy is a good thing. By the end of it all, I didn’t know what it was trying to say. From the beginning it’s clear that The Circle is up to no good. They’re planting small camouflaged cameras all over for worldwide surveillance, but it’s never shown as being as negative as it should be for a film like this. It could’ve ran with the paranoia created by a situation like this and been a good thriller in the vein of something like All the President’s Men, which would’ve made for a far more entertaining film. The issue of mass surveillance is never shown to be anything but black and white. One scene it saves someone’s life and another scene it leads to someone’s death. That’s as complex as it gets. Actually, the death scene I mentioned is probably the highlight of the whole thing. It shows how the internet leads to mob mentality, resulting in an accidental car crash. It’s a decent enough scene, although the crash itself is a little silly.

I could excuse the unoriginal ideas and the bad acting if the film was at least a bit entertaining. It is not. With the exception of some acting that ends up being slightly funny, the movie is ungodly boring. It’s being marketed as a “techno-thriller”, but it offers no thrills. There’s absolutely no tension and it’s presented in the dullest way imaginable.