Filmology Rating: 1.67 out of 4

Mae Holland (Emma Watson) lands a job of a lifetime at the world's most powerful technology and social media company “The Circle”. Encouraged by the company's founder (Tom Hanks), Mae joins a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and personal freedom.

With an all-star cast of Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, and the late Bill Paxton, this movie has to be a success right? Yeahhh about that….. This has to be one of the best examples of having a talented cast, an originally interesting story, and doing absolutely nothing with it. “The Circle” had such promise and missed its mark on literally every single level.

To start with the only real positive, the story behind everything was enjoyable. This giant company called The Circle (think mix of Google and Facebook) is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. With their new technological advancements, they have the ability to monitor essentially every aspect of life ranging from monitoring someone’s health, setting up tiny advanced cameras to connect the world, to being able to find criminals. With these types of advancements brings ethical debates of how much monitoring is too much? How much do we need to be online and portray our lives to everyone around us? These ethical and social questions were really good and something I really liked because these are real questions that people have to ask themselves.

This really intriguing plot brings me to my first several issues. They never answered the question of why Tom Hanks and The Circle really wanted to be so power hungry and control everything. Then in the conclusion, they allude to bad things happening behind the scenes but never once allude to their purpose behind what they have done. On top of this, there really wasn’t any real conclusion or completion to the story. Something big happens and then somewhat of a “conflict resolution” that brings the movie to a close. I use quotations because it was such a weak conflict and resolution that it makes the movie fall flat.

As hinted at before with its all-star cast, none of them were used well at all and that can be blamed on the very clunky writing and poor directing. Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors of all time and he was VERY mediocre. He really wasn’t a huge force in this film because his screen time was not as often as the trailer hinted at. When he was on the screen, he just wasn’t given much work with. The same goes for Emma Watson who gave the best performance and that isn’t saying too much. Her character really didn’t have much authority or strength to her to really make you truly invested in her. John Boyega’s character was honestly laughable. He was completely wasted which was such a shame and with Bill Paxton… I’m sorry this had to be your last movie because you deserved a better sendoff.

To top it all off, there were several more issues that I just don't have the heart or time to discuss. Other than an originally intriguing story that they soon crushed and a mediocre performance by Emma Watson, “The Circle” was all over the place and turned out flat.

Rating: Skip It

-Nick

James Ponsoldt, the director and one of the writers of The Circle, was a director whom I thought could do no wrong.  He directed one of my favorite films The Spectacular Now and two other films I thought were fascinating - Smashed and The End of the Tour - so I went into The Circle with high expectations.  A  director who seems to understand how people interact and the ramifications our interactions with each other can have on our own soul, The Circle seemed to be a perfect fit for Ponsoldt but sadly he might have missed the mark on this film.

Mae Holland, played by Emma Watson, is rather down on her luck.  She is working at a job she dislikes, doesn’t make enough money to have a car that works, and her father is slowly dying due to his multiple sclerosis.  Mae feels that her life might finally change for the better when she gets an interview at The Circle, think Google and Facebook combined.  Mae decides to help co-founders of the company Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton, played by Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt, develop The Circle to have complete transparency within our world.   

The Circle is an adaptation of a novel by the same name written by Dave Eggers which was originally published in 2013.  Most cinephiles will know Eggers as one of the co-writers of the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, so it’s clear that Eggers likes to try and deal with big concepts like childhood, technology, and loneliness.  Once again those concepts seem perfect for James Ponsoldt’s ideology.  The screenplay for The Circle was written by both Eggers and Ponsoldt and it feels completely rushed and rather dated at this point.  If this film would have been released around 2009 when Facebook was becoming the most popular social media site, it might have some relevance but now it just feels like an older generation looking back and talking about the good old days when they had to actually talk to people.  I agree actual communication is something that is being lost and might never come back.  I agree that we spend too much time looking down at our screens rather than actually experiencing life.  But do we really need a movie to tell us simple concepts like that?  We have seen films like The Social Network, Nerve, and going back even earlier to 1984, these concepts are not new and it’s rather insulting for a film to act like it’s reinventing the wheel.  

With a cast that includes Emma Watson, Bill Paxton, Karen Gillan, Tom Hanks, and John Boyega, you would expect to have some of the best acting you have seen on screen this year.  You would expect it, but you would be terribly disappointed.  Ellar Coltrane, who was the star of Boyhood, is one of the worst actors I have seen lately.  A piece of wood could give better line readings than Coltrane and the fact that he is still getting work actually hurts my heart for starving actors everywhere.  The script doesn’t help Coltrane but a talented actor would make me attempt to care for the character of Mercer but I’m left feeling nothing for him.  Emma Watson is having a rather great year with Beauty and the Beast but she is proving once again to be one of the weakest elements of the film.  I loved Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the later Harry Potter films so it’s not that I have a dislike for her as an actress or as a person but most of her recent film roles have left me frustrated.  This film in particular when her character changes her moral values at the drop of a pin, one moment she will be against The Circle and the next she will be singing in the hills about how much she loves it, in the exact same scene.  While some of that does go back to the script, it also has to go back to the actor or actress for not portraying the motivations of the character.  Show that you are having battles with your inner demons rather than acting like nothing is actually changing.     

For those who want a film with an actual ending, which I hope would be everyone, this film is not for you.  It just ends abruptly without any character arcs wrapping up or any storylines being wrapped up.  It feels messy and incomplete which had fumes coming out of my head.  The film has no idea what it actually wants to say about technology, does it help or hurt our society?  Does complete transparency help us live our true lives or does it make us live more superficial lives?  The film doesn’t care to actually give an answer nor does it have the time to, apparently.  This concept is ripe for a television miniseries where over the course of eight hours we can look at how technology is negatively and positively affecting society.  Much like Nerve from last year, I think this film has a great concept but it does very little with it and that is much more frustrating than watching a truly bad film.    

Rating: Skip It

-Jonny G