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| No company led by Tom Hanks could ever be evil |
Remember This? The Circle
Director - James Ponsoldt
Writers - James Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers
Starring - Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Patton Oswalt, Karen Gillan, Bill Paxton, Glenne Headley, John Boyega
You would think a movie starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks would be remembered in some way less than six months after its theatrical release just by sheer virtue of a pairing of stars that seemingly appeals to all film watching demographics. It is quite a testament to this particular film that I had completely forgotten about it when I was researching movie for this feature and upon seeing James Ponsoldt's name I had to watch it. Sure it's gotten bad reviews but I figured this combination of Ponsoldt directing Watson, Hanks and a great collection of supporting actors would offer something. I'm a big fan of Ponsoldt's previous work, Smashed, The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour and was curious as to how his foray into (moderately) big budget filmmaking would go. The answer: not so good.
To put into perspective as to how poorly this movie performed at the box office, it was released nearly two months after Emma Watson's Beauty and the Beast, and the movie in which Watson acts across from Dan Stevens in a full giant mo-cap getup outgrossed The Circle by 50% from the date of The Circle's premiere (roughly $30 million to $20 million). When given the choice between seeing Emma Watson and Tom Hanks play with the internet and seeing Emma Watson try and sing again, audiences chose to watch her sing. Now Beauty and the Beast was a box office behemoth (currently the #1 grossing move of the year at the domestic box office, at least until The Last Jedi comes out) but The Circle managed to completely disappear in it's shadow.
A quick note before I actually get on with reviewing this movie. I will be completely spoiling it. I am doing this for your benefit. You do not want to see this movie and if I even hint as to what this movie is going to do, you may rush out to see it in a morbid curiosity. Do not do that. This is a bad movie. It may sound like an interested clusterfuck of a botched Black Mirror episode, but still, do not waste your time.
Adapted from a Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle imagines a world where a company called The Circle has supplanted Google, Apple and Facebook to become the defacto giant tech company, holding a complete monopoly in everything internet. Social media, spy cameras, customer service for advertisers. You better believe they have all that. Emma Watson is the completely blank slate functioning both as the audience surrogate and the lead character. It is a bold choice to give your main character exactly one defining characteristic (kayaking) but hey, the script kinda needs an audience surrogate to explain everything because what else is it going to do, actually figure out how to get everything across in a manner other than having different characters explain everything?
Well, Emma Watson gets a job at this company because Karen Gillan is apparently her best friend (this friendship only seems to exist because it's in the script, I don't actually believe these characters ever knew each other) and Emma gets to use her boring call service experience to respond to customer feedback where she is immediately judged and given a score our of 100 (this inanely-bureaucratic grading rubric is dropped almost immediately) which seems super important. Once she gets the hang of that, she is accosted by the local social media team and given another scoring system which grades her extra-curricular participation in work events (this is actually the best scene in the movie, it's funny and biting satire of this kind of corporate culture and social media usage). This score is also immediately dropped but does seem to be the impetus for Emma to move into the company dormitories, away from her family which includes her ailing father who suffers from MS and the boy-with-a-childhood-crush-on-her.
The MS suffering father is played by Bill Paxton in what would be his last role and the family's financial situation in which the damned insurance companies will not pay for his treatments is magically solved when The Circle just decided to pay for all their expenses because they are a benevolent company who cares. There's also a mother, but she doesn't have any character traits of her own. She's just generic mother #6. Bill Paxton doesn't have much of a character either but at least he has MS. And that boy is Ellar Coltrane (aka the boy from Boyhood) proving why he hasn't done anything since then. He is completely awful here alternating between wooden and annoying. I guess he can really only play himself. Well anyways he shows up, gets laughed at because Emma Watson posts a picture of his deer horn sculptures online, disappears into the woods and then gets killed because Emma Watson uses social media. No, really, that's how he dies. I'll get back to it later.
So I guess I should talk about Tom Hanks now. He's Father Figure Steve Jobs. He makes presentations to lecture halls full of adoring employees. Quick tangent: I think the world outside of The Circle Campus is an illusion because it doesn't seem to exist in this movie. Ok, back to Tom. He plays this room perfectly getting them to absolutely lose their shit at graphs. Graphs of completely nothing data. This presentation presents the first assault on personal privacy that this company has prepared with Tom Hanks debuting little spy cameras that can be put literally anywhere and they take HD video and upload it to the cloud. And they make graphs somehow. They are basically magic and helpfully set up the dominant theme of the movie. Personal Privacy, fuck that shit.
Emma Watson need a break from being at the Circle so she goes kayaking and almost dies because it is generally not advised to go kayaking alone into the middle of the San Francisco harbor during inclement weather. She is saved however by the power of magic spy cameras and GPS tracking. Because technology saved her life, Emma decides that technology should be her life, and everybody's else's. She puts on one of the spy cameras and livestreams her life to the world and as proved by The Truman Show, audiences in fictional worlds love nothing more than ordinary, boring people living ordinary, boring lives as long as these lives are broadcast 24/7. Whenever she does anything a giant cloud of comments appears around her. These comment storms are weirdly devoid of trolls perhaps indicating that this Circle takeover of the internet is a sort of utopia.
Emma's livestreaming life leads to bigger and better things for her at The Circle, like getting invited to "secret" evil board meetings wherein Tom Hanks, Patton Oswalt and the rest of the Circle executives plot world domination. Yes, she livestreams it. She even makes the suggestion that instead of merely stopping at tying all of the world's democracies to their social media platforms, they petition countries to make it mandatory for every person in the world to have a Circle account. This is the goddamn audience surrogate suggesting this for no rhyme or reason! Blank Slate Emma is now Big Brother Emma with absolutely no build. The only outrage at this plan doesn't come from the world watching the livestream, it comes from John Boyega and Karen Gillan-who-has-completely-fallen-apart.
John Boyega exists on the fringes of this film. He is occasionally glimpsed in the background, texting or something on his phone. He is the ousted founder who is angry at the company for twisting his vision into some vaguely evil machinations. The one thing he does do in the movie is flirt with/expose company secrets to Emma Watson (This is before she begins livestreaming). He takes her to the secret underground bunker where the world's secrets will be stored and generally sets up the big overthrow the bad company plotline that is then immediately dropped so Emma can go kayaking.
And Karen Gillan is just a mess in this meeting. There are vague hints that she is being overworked but she goes from normal, happy, healthy, excitable best friend to complete trainwreck offscreen in about 5 minutes. She has somehow turned against the company and decided that they are evil and wants nothing to do with them for no reason. Maybe professional jealousy that Emma Watson becomes super important to the company after about a week of work? It's not very clear. Anyways, she fucks off back to Scotland (where she is apparently from?)(Sidenote: Maybe they should have made Emma's character English because her American accent is fucking terrible here). She's not important so let's move on.
So, the Circle had an evil board meeting wherein they decided to petition the governments of the world to make it mandatory for their citizens to have Circle accounts and in a few asides it is implied that not only is this happening, but the world is shockingly cool with it. Well, I guess the plans were livestreamed and nobody cared then. This makes them cocky. They decide, hey why not add internet vigilante justice to our purview. So they put Emma on the stage and have her make the world track down a wanted murderer. The world, having nothing better to do during the day than watch Circle presentations, catches this killer in about 10 minutes. The mob wants more blood. They want Ellar Coltrane's blood. He's become an anti-technology hermit which causes the world to hunt him down in their Emma inspired bloodlust leading him to drive off a bridge.
He's dead, Emma's sad. She has seen the horrors of what technology has wrought. She decides to take down the company and clean up the world. And she does so by exposing Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt's super duper secret emails. This is awful for them because, you see, they are so pro-transparency that having any sort of secrets themselves makes them evil, I guess? It kinda has to be that because I can't imagine what is in those emails that would be worse that what they livestreamed to the world.
Emma takes down the company and in a final speech she is super hopeful and optimistic about the future and promises to lead the world into the light. That light is good, happy cameras everywhere watching everybody, livestreaming lectures, showcasing medics in wartorn countries, broadcasting dog videos. Should be fucking bleak, right? Well, that's not how it comes across. Because there was absolutely zero character development anywhere in this movie, Emma never transitions from perky, good girl to damning angel from hell. And when you cast Tom Hanks as Evil Daddy Steve Jobs, you better subvert his natural charms but instead he just exists as Tom Hanks and be default you kinda end up rooting for him.
Now, these could be used to go super Black Mirror dark and show a world where this shit is encouraged, but considering there is enough anti-Circle stuff in this movie it clearly isn't trying to do that. Or at least, it's not going to do it competently. For example, there is a scene at a party where a Circle employee tells Emma of their plans to implant tracking chips into babies to prevent all future kidnappings and Emma is rightfully disgusted by it. So on one hand, this movie shows the evils of this company by having the main character condemn them and on the other, she is actively encouraging them. It's a confused satire than loses all of its bite and defaults to being kinda pro-Circle. Nobody should ever be pro-Big Brother. The Circle is pro-Big Brother.
Schurmann Score - 1/10
To put into perspective as to how poorly this movie performed at the box office, it was released nearly two months after Emma Watson's Beauty and the Beast, and the movie in which Watson acts across from Dan Stevens in a full giant mo-cap getup outgrossed The Circle by 50% from the date of The Circle's premiere (roughly $30 million to $20 million). When given the choice between seeing Emma Watson and Tom Hanks play with the internet and seeing Emma Watson try and sing again, audiences chose to watch her sing. Now Beauty and the Beast was a box office behemoth (currently the #1 grossing move of the year at the domestic box office, at least until The Last Jedi comes out) but The Circle managed to completely disappear in it's shadow.
A quick note before I actually get on with reviewing this movie. I will be completely spoiling it. I am doing this for your benefit. You do not want to see this movie and if I even hint as to what this movie is going to do, you may rush out to see it in a morbid curiosity. Do not do that. This is a bad movie. It may sound like an interested clusterfuck of a botched Black Mirror episode, but still, do not waste your time.
Adapted from a Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle imagines a world where a company called The Circle has supplanted Google, Apple and Facebook to become the defacto giant tech company, holding a complete monopoly in everything internet. Social media, spy cameras, customer service for advertisers. You better believe they have all that. Emma Watson is the completely blank slate functioning both as the audience surrogate and the lead character. It is a bold choice to give your main character exactly one defining characteristic (kayaking) but hey, the script kinda needs an audience surrogate to explain everything because what else is it going to do, actually figure out how to get everything across in a manner other than having different characters explain everything?
Well, Emma Watson gets a job at this company because Karen Gillan is apparently her best friend (this friendship only seems to exist because it's in the script, I don't actually believe these characters ever knew each other) and Emma gets to use her boring call service experience to respond to customer feedback where she is immediately judged and given a score our of 100 (this inanely-bureaucratic grading rubric is dropped almost immediately) which seems super important. Once she gets the hang of that, she is accosted by the local social media team and given another scoring system which grades her extra-curricular participation in work events (this is actually the best scene in the movie, it's funny and biting satire of this kind of corporate culture and social media usage). This score is also immediately dropped but does seem to be the impetus for Emma to move into the company dormitories, away from her family which includes her ailing father who suffers from MS and the boy-with-a-childhood-crush-on-her.
The MS suffering father is played by Bill Paxton in what would be his last role and the family's financial situation in which the damned insurance companies will not pay for his treatments is magically solved when The Circle just decided to pay for all their expenses because they are a benevolent company who cares. There's also a mother, but she doesn't have any character traits of her own. She's just generic mother #6. Bill Paxton doesn't have much of a character either but at least he has MS. And that boy is Ellar Coltrane (aka the boy from Boyhood) proving why he hasn't done anything since then. He is completely awful here alternating between wooden and annoying. I guess he can really only play himself. Well anyways he shows up, gets laughed at because Emma Watson posts a picture of his deer horn sculptures online, disappears into the woods and then gets killed because Emma Watson uses social media. No, really, that's how he dies. I'll get back to it later.
So I guess I should talk about Tom Hanks now. He's Father Figure Steve Jobs. He makes presentations to lecture halls full of adoring employees. Quick tangent: I think the world outside of The Circle Campus is an illusion because it doesn't seem to exist in this movie. Ok, back to Tom. He plays this room perfectly getting them to absolutely lose their shit at graphs. Graphs of completely nothing data. This presentation presents the first assault on personal privacy that this company has prepared with Tom Hanks debuting little spy cameras that can be put literally anywhere and they take HD video and upload it to the cloud. And they make graphs somehow. They are basically magic and helpfully set up the dominant theme of the movie. Personal Privacy, fuck that shit.
Emma Watson need a break from being at the Circle so she goes kayaking and almost dies because it is generally not advised to go kayaking alone into the middle of the San Francisco harbor during inclement weather. She is saved however by the power of magic spy cameras and GPS tracking. Because technology saved her life, Emma decides that technology should be her life, and everybody's else's. She puts on one of the spy cameras and livestreams her life to the world and as proved by The Truman Show, audiences in fictional worlds love nothing more than ordinary, boring people living ordinary, boring lives as long as these lives are broadcast 24/7. Whenever she does anything a giant cloud of comments appears around her. These comment storms are weirdly devoid of trolls perhaps indicating that this Circle takeover of the internet is a sort of utopia.
Emma's livestreaming life leads to bigger and better things for her at The Circle, like getting invited to "secret" evil board meetings wherein Tom Hanks, Patton Oswalt and the rest of the Circle executives plot world domination. Yes, she livestreams it. She even makes the suggestion that instead of merely stopping at tying all of the world's democracies to their social media platforms, they petition countries to make it mandatory for every person in the world to have a Circle account. This is the goddamn audience surrogate suggesting this for no rhyme or reason! Blank Slate Emma is now Big Brother Emma with absolutely no build. The only outrage at this plan doesn't come from the world watching the livestream, it comes from John Boyega and Karen Gillan-who-has-completely-fallen-apart.
John Boyega exists on the fringes of this film. He is occasionally glimpsed in the background, texting or something on his phone. He is the ousted founder who is angry at the company for twisting his vision into some vaguely evil machinations. The one thing he does do in the movie is flirt with/expose company secrets to Emma Watson (This is before she begins livestreaming). He takes her to the secret underground bunker where the world's secrets will be stored and generally sets up the big overthrow the bad company plotline that is then immediately dropped so Emma can go kayaking.
And Karen Gillan is just a mess in this meeting. There are vague hints that she is being overworked but she goes from normal, happy, healthy, excitable best friend to complete trainwreck offscreen in about 5 minutes. She has somehow turned against the company and decided that they are evil and wants nothing to do with them for no reason. Maybe professional jealousy that Emma Watson becomes super important to the company after about a week of work? It's not very clear. Anyways, she fucks off back to Scotland (where she is apparently from?)(Sidenote: Maybe they should have made Emma's character English because her American accent is fucking terrible here). She's not important so let's move on.
So, the Circle had an evil board meeting wherein they decided to petition the governments of the world to make it mandatory for their citizens to have Circle accounts and in a few asides it is implied that not only is this happening, but the world is shockingly cool with it. Well, I guess the plans were livestreamed and nobody cared then. This makes them cocky. They decide, hey why not add internet vigilante justice to our purview. So they put Emma on the stage and have her make the world track down a wanted murderer. The world, having nothing better to do during the day than watch Circle presentations, catches this killer in about 10 minutes. The mob wants more blood. They want Ellar Coltrane's blood. He's become an anti-technology hermit which causes the world to hunt him down in their Emma inspired bloodlust leading him to drive off a bridge.
He's dead, Emma's sad. She has seen the horrors of what technology has wrought. She decides to take down the company and clean up the world. And she does so by exposing Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt's super duper secret emails. This is awful for them because, you see, they are so pro-transparency that having any sort of secrets themselves makes them evil, I guess? It kinda has to be that because I can't imagine what is in those emails that would be worse that what they livestreamed to the world.
Emma takes down the company and in a final speech she is super hopeful and optimistic about the future and promises to lead the world into the light. That light is good, happy cameras everywhere watching everybody, livestreaming lectures, showcasing medics in wartorn countries, broadcasting dog videos. Should be fucking bleak, right? Well, that's not how it comes across. Because there was absolutely zero character development anywhere in this movie, Emma never transitions from perky, good girl to damning angel from hell. And when you cast Tom Hanks as Evil Daddy Steve Jobs, you better subvert his natural charms but instead he just exists as Tom Hanks and be default you kinda end up rooting for him.
Now, these could be used to go super Black Mirror dark and show a world where this shit is encouraged, but considering there is enough anti-Circle stuff in this movie it clearly isn't trying to do that. Or at least, it's not going to do it competently. For example, there is a scene at a party where a Circle employee tells Emma of their plans to implant tracking chips into babies to prevent all future kidnappings and Emma is rightfully disgusted by it. So on one hand, this movie shows the evils of this company by having the main character condemn them and on the other, she is actively encouraging them. It's a confused satire than loses all of its bite and defaults to being kinda pro-Circle. Nobody should ever be pro-Big Brother. The Circle is pro-Big Brother.
Schurmann Score - 1/10
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