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Overanalyzing Anime
Blog Owner & Lead Writer
The Circle tells the story of Mae (Emma Watson), a young woman who, after a string of uninspiring temp. jobs, obtains the position of her dreams, working at the world’s largest technology/social media company, “The Circle.” While everything at “The Circle” is seemingly wonderful at first, it quickly takes a turn as she becomes aware of the greater schemes at play.
So, I’ll start by saying that I was thoroughly disappointed with this film. It’s not that the film itself was horrible - it wasn’t. In fact, the film had plenty of great, thought-provoking moments. The idea of “The Cirlce” (which is basically what the love-child of FaceBook and Google would look like) is an interesting concept; on the surface it seems like a company looking to do something incredible in terms of keeping people not only connected, but safe. The technologies they created were interesting, but they were constantly being undermined by the lackluster plot.
It’s not that I didn’t care about Mae’s family struggles or Mercer’s (Ellar Coltrane) unwarranted harassment, but the scenes that were meant to carry the most weight often fell flat. Even the final scene, which started off incredibly strong, ultimately didn’t quite hit the mark as it neared the end.
Perhaps my biggest issue is the ambiguous relationship between Mae and Ty. There seems to be some sort of connection between them - so much in fact that the two worked together in their attempt to change “The Circle,” but their conversations were limited to three scenes. Yeah, that’s right - throughout the entire film they only speak to each other three times. It’s just very strange.
I will say that I personally liked Tom Hanks as the companies’ CEO, Bailey; his performance was very reminiscent of the late Steve Jobs, as I’m sure the character was (at least somewhat) modeled after.
All in all The Circle is a film that will drum up a lot of conversation - unfortunately, it won’t be about the inspiring (though, possibly dangerous) new technologies it presents, but instead about how uninspiring the characters & plot of this film were.
My rating: 6.5/10
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