The Circle (2017)
Directed by James Ponsoldt
A young tech worker takes a job at a powerful Internet corporation, quickly rises up the company's ranks, and soon finds herself in a perilous situation concerning privacy, surveillance and freedom. She comes to learn that her decisions and actions will determine the future of humanity.
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3 films that influenced The Circle
What critics say influenced The Circle
“The Circle” is a cautionary Big Brother cyber thriller touching on themes explored in “The Net” (1995), “The Truman Show” (1998), “EDtv” (1999) and “Minority Report” (2002), with just a hint of “The Firm” (1993) and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956 and 1978), not to mention the “Gryzzl” storyline on the TV series “Parks and Recreation.”
The Circle is so bereft of inspiration that Ponsoldt tries stirring up a little cyber anxiety by tapping composer Danny Elfman to do a twitchy, sub-Social Network score—and that’s when he’s not cribbing ideas from far better societal X-rays like Network and The Truman Show.
Nevertheless, The Circle owes a debt to both Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and Ron Howard’s EDtv in the way it offers up the possibility of watching the life of a subject 24/7.
A passing resemblance to The Truman Show is the best thing the second half of The Circle has going for it.
It's so The Truman Show, there's even a scene in which Mae churns through a storm in a kayak as omnipresent Circle cameras broadcast her jailbreak attempt to the world.
Mae is recruited by Bailey and his partner (Patton Oswalt, as the compleat weasel) to become a company advocate, and before long she has embraced the cult of “transparency,” volunteering to wear a micro-camera 24/7 and turn her life into a YouTube-style reality series: “Big Brother” meets “The Truman Show.”
As a warning about the bad things that can happen when we grow lazy about our liberties, “The Circle” is unfortunately up against “The Handmaid’s Tale” — a much more topical nightmare for our uneasy age.
To conclude, The Circle is a film that, by all means, should have worked: it is directed by James Ponsoldt ( The End of the Tour , Smashed , The Spectacular Now ), contains a fine cast, including Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, and Karen Gillan; and, in addition, imbues timely themes of surveillance, privacy, and the fear of a potential future that the over-saturation of social networking could lead to.
Directed by The Spectacular Now 's James Ponsoldt, The Circle just feels a day late and a dollar short in its treatment of the subject matter.
“The Circle” is directed by the top-notch filmmaker James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now”); it’s an adaptation of a novel by the acclaimed author Dave Eggers (who co-wrote the screenplay with Ponsoldt); it stars Emma Watson, Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt.
Adapted by filmmaker James Ponsoldt ( The End Of The Tour ; The Spectacular Now ) and novelist Dave Eggers from the latter’s novel of the same name, the movie follows Mae (Emma Watson) as she is granted access to the fantasy of many upwardly mobile young people: an entry-level job at a Google-like digital conglomerate.
It's all so horribly disappointing, given the skill that writer/director James Ponsoldt has shown on his three previous, excellent features ( Smashed , The Spectacular Now , and The End of the Tour ), all of which dealt with deeply, movingly human flaws.
“The Circle” is all the more disappointing, given it was based on a novel by the brilliant wordsmith Dave Eggers and directed by James Ponsoldt of “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour” acclaim.