-By Cernan Cabriesy
Despite the star power of The Circle, the movie disappoints on so many levels. The story follows Mae Holland (Emma Watson) who gets the opportunity of a lifetime for a dream job at a massive internet company called The Circle — which resembles Facebook on steroids — collecting every piece of data the world has to offer, making it available for every user. Whatever data the company can’t collect from other sources, it collects on its own by distributing millions of tiny satellite cameras to users across the globe to be placed everywhere.
The movie explores many of the ethical questions regarding personal privacy, business occultism, and the ability of major corporations to aid society by catching “bad guys” on the one hand, while destroying the lives of innocent individuals on the other.
Perhaps it explorers too many of those ethical questions at once. So many, in fact, that the movie is unsuccessful at resolving any of them. Just as Mae decides to become “transparent,” as it is called in the film, by wearing a camera all the time and allowing the company to record her every move, conversation, and action, likewise this character’s arc becomes so transparent that any less-than-astute observer will be able to figure out the climactic twist before it happens.
The only lesson we are left with at the end is that the invasion of oir privacy will continue to get worse, there is no one to stop it, and there will always be someone at the top holding the keys, so they had better be “ethical,” whatever that means.
Every character in this film is gray. There are no real villains, there are no real heroes. All of the other high-powered stars like Tom Hanks and John Boyega could have easily been replaced by unknown actors.
Worst of all is that liberal Hollywood gets lost in this spider web by apparently deciding to trivialize the most serious of ethical issues our future faces, mostly by turning privacy on its head and making it the villain. It’s one thing to take down the CEO of a company who makes everyone else’s life transparent except his own. By doing so Hollywood still gets to “Stick it to the Man.” That’s right out of their playbook. But they get completely lost in all of the other issues and problems addressed throughout the film. I am guessing this is the case because most liberals are ethically stunted to begin with.
Perhaps we will have to wait for some indie filmmaker to tackle the real issues properly before we get a good film out of these topics.
[Editor’s note: Looks like Hanks’ The Circle is doing poorly at the box office, too. Tom Hanks’ latest movie is his biggest bomb EVER, lowest opening box office in his career.]