The Circle (2017)

The Circle (2017)

IMDB Rating 5.2/10 (as on 02.05.2017)

When Mae is hired to work for the world's largest and most powerful tech and social media company, she sees it as an opportunity of a lifetime. As she rises through the ranks, she is encouraged by the company's founder, Eamon Bailey, to engage in a groundbreaking experiment that pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and ultimately her personal freedom. Her participation in the experiment, and every decision she makes begin to affect the lives and future of her friends, family and that of humanity.

Director: James Ponsoldt

Writers: James Ponsoldt (screenplay), Dave Eggers (screenplay)

Stars: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega

1h 50min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

IMDB link Here

 In ‘The Circle,’ Click Here if You Think You’re Being Watched

GLENN KENNY

From the drab 1995 cyberthriller “The Net” onward, mainstream American movies have been hard-pressed to pertinently weigh in on the internet and its discontents. Yes, comedies are regularly larded with “old folks can’t tweet” and “these darn kids and their ‘texting’” jokes, while espionage thrillers invariably serve up hot webcam action. But few pictures attempt to take a hard look at what it all means — perhaps because the entertainment business has some resentment about its digital usurpation.

So credit “The Circle” with ambition, at least. This film, directed by James Ponsoldt, is an adaptation of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel, and the two collaborated on the screenplay. Mr. Eggers’s book is both a satire and a cautionary tale, grafting surveillance-state mechanisms to a faux-progressive vision with pronounced cult leanings — a lot of its “join us” vibe feels passed down from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a tale set, like the one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You’re also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Ms. Watson has to spend way too much time looking concerned while staring at various screens. Ellar Coltrane, who was so unaffectedly appealing as he grew up onscreen in Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” can’t find any footing in the role of Mae’s Mr. Integrity ex-boyfriend. It doesn’t help that he has to mouth lines like “We used to go on adventures and have fun and see things, and you were brave and exciting.”

 Mr. Hanks evokes an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega — playing a character who was vital in the book but whose role has been reconfigured so that his function in the movie makes no sense — mostly stands around at the rear of auditoriums, backlit, and when called upon to speak does a very creditable Denzel Washington impersonation.

The movie is dedicated to Bill Paxton, who died in February and is quite fine in the small role of Mae’s father, who’s dealing with multiple sclerosis. The dedication is a kind and considerate touch. Still, if you’d like to enjoy a movie featuring both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Hanks, I’d recommend “Apollo 13.”

Read full review at New york times

James Ponsoldt's The Circle, a high-gloss imagining of how current trends might soon lead to the actual and total end of privacy, makes its Tribeca premiere on a day whose morning news reported that a man in Thailand had live-streamed himself killing his infant daughter. Recent weeks have seen border guards demanding total access to travelers' social media accounts; Congress just told internet service providers it isn't illegal to sell their customers' private data.

That is to say, we probably already live in a scarier world, filled with stranger horrors, than the one The Circle presents as a cautionary tale. Given the speed and unpredictability of change in this arena, it's reasonable to wonder if a big-budget feature film, much less one based on a four-year-old novel (by Dave Eggers, who co-wrote this adaptation's screenplay), can hope to speak to the needs of the moment. In its quicker-turnaround, nugget-sized parables, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series may be better equipped.

Yet it would be absurd if the movies didn't address the massive experiment humanity is undertaking, and this film — with its big stars and easily digested moral dilemmas — is the kind of "issue"-inflected entertainment that could stimulate some thought about the services we use and which use us online. In any event, the pic should mark a commercial step up for Ponsoldt, who has enjoyed critical support for indies like The End of the Tour and The Spectacular Now but will now have his first crack at Middle America.

We already know that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want us knowing as much about his personal life as he knows about ours, that Eric Schmidt would not willingly show you his Google search history. But Ponsoldt and Eggers treat the hypocrisy of Circle chiefs Bailey and Stenton like a secret to be unveiled triumphantly, then end the film with optimistic pronouncements that first sound like ironic threats, then seem to about-face and greet a surveillance state as if it's utopia. The film's final message isn't as difficult to grapple with as the world we're actually living in, but that doesn't make it easy.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

The Circle Tackles Internet Privacy Issues, Makes Millennials Look Dumb

Stephanie Zacharek

If you’ve looked at a newspaper, magazine or web site within the past, oh, 15 years, you probably know that Internet privacy is an issue of massive concern to all of us. Now there’s an almost wholly pointless movie about it (one that isn’t Oliver Stone’s Snowden

In adapting Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel of the same name, director James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour, The Spectacular Now) raises plenty of ideas that we should all be deeply concerned about. Once they're raised, he has no idea what to do with them. The picture appears to be building toward some cathartic climax, but it never arrives. The final shot is so ambiguous that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be terrified at the mere notion of these tiny all-seeing peepers, or wish you could run out and buy one right away. The picture features a few wickedly funny sequences, including one in which a duo of chipper Circle footsoldiers explain the company’s social-media policy to Mae. (Basically, having a social-media presence is completely optional and also mandatory.) It also features the wonderful and rarely seen Glenne Headly in a small role, as Mae’s mother. Bill Paxton, in what has turned out to be one of his final film appearances, plays Mae’s father, who’s suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. It’s no one’s fault, but the performance—beautifully sympathetic, as so many of Paxton’s performances were—is painful to watch, largely because the character is gradually slipping away, physically, from his family, just as Paxton so recently slipped away from us.Watson is reasonably charming at first but annoying by the end, largely because it’s hard to believe that this clearly bright young woman could also be such a gullible idiot. The story condescends to Mae, and, by extension, to smart, ambitious millennials everywhere—I’m not a millennial, but I felt offended on their behalf. Shot by Matthew Libatique, The Circle has a polished, handsome surface, but it also looks as if it were designed by committee, like a fussed-over corporate logo. That would be OK, probably—if the movie at least knew what it was selling.

Read full review at Time

The Circle’ isn’t half bad, but it’s only half good

Ann Hornaday

The Circle,” a technological thriller starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, didn’t screen for critics, usually a sign of fatally damaged goods. But the movie, an adaptation of a 2013 Dave Eggers novel about a young woman coming to terms with privacy, ethics and humanity while working at a Facebook-like company, isn’t half bad. Directed by James Ponsoldt, who brought such atmospheric authenticity to the films “Smashed,” “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour,” from a script he co-wrote with Eggers, “The Circle” starts out with promise, as Watson’s character, Mae, leaves a dead-end customer service job with a Bay Area water company to work for Eamon Bailey (Hanks), the bearded, laid-back, effortlessly charismatic leader of a many-tentacled tech behemoth called the Circle.

“The Circle” couldn’t be more timely, as Facebook grapples with murders performed live on its platform, Congress seeks to gut privacy protections for Internet users, and ideals of transparency and accountability curdle into the far darker norms of surveillance capitalism. But that’s also made the film seem strangely out of step with times that seem to be outrunning it every day. It feels both prescient and dated; realistic and outlandish; fresh and hopelessly derivative of everything from “The Truman Show” to the superb Netflix series “Black Mirror.”

Although Watson does a sturdy job of holding the screen for much of “The Circle’s” running time, Hanks is woefully underused. What the viewer thinks might be a battle of the wills between their two characters instead becomes a convenient set of schematic, perfunctory encounters. Patton Oswalt and John Boyega are similarly wasted in roles that feel thin and, in Boyega’s case, painfully forced. (Among the supporting players, the Scottish actress Karen Gillan does a particularly good job as Mae’s friend Annie, going from on-fleek knowledge worker to strung-out corporate drone with impressive credibility.) Despite its relevance, flashes of insight and welcome portrayal of a female protagonist unencumbered by the usual romantic-sexual tensions with her male peers, “The Circle” can’t help but be a disappointment, given its provenance and potential. It may not be half bad, but that also means it’s only half good.

Read full review at Washington post

The Circle Is a Laughable Tech Thriller  

DAVID SIMS

In 1995, a perfect piece of techno-alarmism was released in theaters, and America was never the same again. The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, predicted a world where your entire identity could be erased and re-written online, where hackers could create online backdoors into all of America’s security agencies, where you could use a website to have a pizza delivered to your door. The film was, at the time, dismissed as an absurd work of paranoia; these days, its prophecies sound extremely ho-hum. Sure, people now use Seamless instead of “Pizza.net,” but forecasting the future through cinema is never a perfect science.

Twenty-two years later comes James Ponsoldt’s The Circle, a new piece of cyber-horror to scoff at, one that predicts a future in which everyone will tie their lives into their online identities, and cameras will monitor our every move. Wait, I hear you say, that sounds eerily prescient! It should be—and yet, The Circle has absolutely no grasp on its own tone. It veers from insidious social commentary to wildly absurd comedy sometimes within the same conversation, warning of a world where we may use Facebook to vote, but also have microchips implanted in our children’s bones. As a satire, The Circle might have been worth a few giggles, but as a deadly serious drama, it’s laughable in an entirely different way.

The movie is based on a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers that presented its dystopic predictions as a sort of knowing fable. Meanwhile, the film, scripted by Eggers and Ponsoldt, has a much more grounded aesthetic. The Circle is an all-encompassing social network, essentially Facebook or Google or Twitter wrapped into one neat package. Its headquarters are a sprawling “campus,” not unlike Apple’s giant glass doughnut, and its employees never seem to leave, since they’re all having too much fun being best friends with one another. It’s all like an episode of Black Mirror, if Black Mirror made no effort whatsoever to be subtle.

The Circle wants its ominous reveal to be a slow build, but it does nothing to get the audience on board. As Mae is sucked in by Eamon’s vision of the future—one of “total transparency” where everyone not only should be using The Circle, but will also be mandated to—it’s difficult to sympathize with her abject naiveté, especially since Watson gives such a blank performance. Early on in the movie, she meets a mysterious co-worker (played by John Boyega) who seems to nurse doubts about the company, but it takes nearly an hour for her to even ask his name or some basic ethical questions about what this all-encompassing social network has planned.

Things eventually take a turn. But the long, goofy lead-up is largely told in keynote addresses and webinar sessions, where the dialogue sounds like a focus-grouped advertorial, and character motivations shift based on whatever obvious point Ponsoldt and Eggers want to make about the dangers of online media. Ellar Coltrane, so beguiling as the focus of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, is disarmingly wooden as Mercer, Mae’s ex-boyfriend and a stand-in for the virtues of an “unplugged” life. Patton Oswalt does some intense glowering as Eamon’s founding partner. 

Much like The Net, maybe The Circle will one day be proven absolutely right about the future of our connected society. Maybe we will all get microchips in our bones, drink green fluids that monitor the pH levels of our stomach, and use Facebook to elect our leaders. And yet even if every moment of it is one day revealed to be startlingly accurate, this ridiculous film wouldn’t be any easier to appreciate in retrospect. Audiences might indeed be nervous about the future of the internet. But The Circle, in the end, has nothing remotely interesting to say about their fears.

Read full review at The atlantic