Directed by: James Ponsoldt
Starring: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Karen Gillan
Rated PG-13, 110 minutes
You might have noticed that Congress recently passed a measure allowing internet service providers to sell consumer data without consumers’ permission. In other words, your personal, medical, and financial information are all Legos in Comcast’s toybox now. Because who needs privacy? Why prevent advertisers from knowing what products you like and then using that information to target you with ads? These companies are just streamlining our lives. It’s for our benefit! Don’t concern yourself with how much money is changing hands or what strangers might know about your medical history—just go on Facebook and generate more data!
Now is the time to get active in protecting ourselves in the digital world, so the timing couldn’t be better for “The Circle,” an adaptation of the Dave Eggers novel about a giant corporation hoarding information about its customers. Arriving at this fraught moment, this movie had a golden opportunity to comment seriously on the deterioration of privacy in the internet age.
Instead, inexplicably, director James Ponsoldt (“The End of the Tour”) uses “The Circle” to go to bat for Big Brother, advocating for a dystopia in which cameras record everything and everyone so that nobody has to feel alone in this big scary world. This isn’t just a stupid movie, it’s an infuriating screed against privacy that does little more than rehash the terrible “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you shouldn't be opposed to surveillance” argument for two hours.
Worse still, this movie doubles as a totally misguided attempt at entertainment. How is it that with so many good actors, no one—not even Tom Hanks!—gives a memorable performance? Why is the script for such a Kubrickian concept just a mix of vague TED Talk–esque speeches and dialogue seemingly lifted from a bad student film? Why is the movie so visually uninteresting? How did “The Circle” end up as this boring, uninspired slop?
Most egregious is the plot, a confusing scramble of inane ideas that seems to have been inspired by a lazy think piece about millennials. Briefly put, the movie follows Mae (Emma Watson, “Beauty and the Beast”), an employee at a cultlike tech giant called the Circle, who starts in customer service but quickly rises through the ranks and becomes part of the Circle’s, well, inner circle. Faced with an opportunity to effect real change at a company that’s growing too powerful, Mae chooses instead to become a pawn in the company’s ominous power grab, selling herself out with nary a reservation. When her personal life falls apart as a result of her devotion to the Circle, she hardly bats an eye. There’s work to do, social media to attend to! The future is now! Or something.
It’s worth noting that Emma Watson gives one of the best performances of her career here. By that, I mean she’s finally figured out what to do with her hands, so she no longer looks like a lost middle schooler trying to remember her blocking. Unfortunately, even if Watson is tolerable, Mae is such an unlikable character, so grotesquely oblivious to the Circle’s wrongdoing and to the harm she herself causes, that she’s as odious as any antagonist. I imagine that wasn’t Ponsoldt’s intention; maybe all Mae’s likable parts got cut in editing.
Similarly, I wonder if the movie’s guiding principle got warped somewhere along the way. Why would anyone in their right mind want to express a favorable view of ubiquitous surveillance? Maybe it was unintentional; maybe “The Circle” was actually supposed to be a criticism of invasive technology. If that’s the case, the end product is so different from the concept that a comparable failure would be getting into a car in Boston, setting the GPS for Chicago, and driving into the Atlantic Ocean.
If, however, Ponsoldt truly did intend to present this sunny view of technological totalitarianism—maybe as the sort of smug contrarian fallacy favored by your least favorite Facebook friends—then all he has done is disseminate a dangerous idea that might convince people to act against their self-interest. The only silver lining I can see is that this reckless proposition was presented so poorly that viewers will hopefully understand that nothing in “The Circle” is worth pursuing in the real world.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/5/17.