Circle

The Circle is a great reminder that Hollywood is full of fucking phonies and frauds, pricks so far up their own assholes they think they’re doing us a favor when they point out the obvious. This movie is a cautionary tale about the role of technology in our lives, but it comes across like a guy standing next to a raging bonfire and telling people, “Be careful, it’s hot.” That dumb fucker burned himself so many times before learning and now he wants to share his discovery that fire is hot.

The main thesis of The Circle is that it might be dangerous to trade away our privacy for convenience. No shit? Who knew?

Oh, right, everyone. Well, everyone who is already online and keeps seeing ads for dick creams pop up just because of the few dozen times you accidentally typed “How do I make my dick super-duper huge?” Into AskJeeves. Or the targeted ads on Facebook for deep discounts at local Thai Lady-man massage parlors. The Circle’s message might be news to luddites and old people with flip phones and Hotmail accounts, but those folks are too busy mass e-mailing video clips of magicians and getting suckered into phishing scams to care.

Just as bad as the shitty obvious message of The Circle is how it overcompensates with earnestness for its lousy ideas. Its plot is a tiny-dicked NRA member and the force with which it plows through illogical scenes is a monster truck with a “Bad Boys Club” decal on the back window. This is also a profoundly dull movie. Unlikable, unintelligent characters do stupid shit, with a barely tangential relationship to tension or rising and falling action. But I’m sure all the grassfuckers involved feel a lot better about themselves for getting this important message out. Grape Starbursts aren’t really made from grapes! We’ve go to warn the little people!

Emma Watson plays Mae Holland, a vaguely defined but unhappy young woman who gets a job in customer service with the Circle, an equally poorly defined monolithic Silicon Valley company. We know she’s unhappy because she kayaks alone and has an unclear relationship with an equally unhappy young man who makes chandeliers out of deer antlers. 

I still don’t know how the fuck the company at the heart of The Circle makes money, just that it’s enormous and collects shitloads of data. Oh, they also make hardware like tiny cameras to spy on people, but mostly they just collect crazy amounts of data about people, such as their location, biometrics, activities, everything. But getting from collecting data to monetizing it is where the temptation toward evil lies, and this fucking movie never shows that. Probably because the grassfuckers who made it don’t really know how to.

Mae is so damn good at helping customers retrieve their passwords that she is quickly elevated past tens of thousands of other employees with tech backgrounds and into the inner circle where she rubs elbows with the company owners, Bailey (Tom Hanks) and Stenton (Patton Oswalt). Bailey is supposed to be the benevolent, brilliant and charismatic face of the Circle, but he comes across like a self-published self-help guru, a living embodiment of a TED Talk for morons. In other words, all superficial, platitude horseshit with nothing real or genuinely clever behind it. Stenton, on the other hand, is so shady and creepy that there’s never a doubt where the movie is headed. I really don’t understand how a movie with so little going on can’t even be subtle.

During one of his TED Talks, Bailey speaks with Mae about how people behave better when watched. “Secrets are Lies,” he tells an audience so fucking stupid they gobble it up. Hey screenwriters (including the overrated Dave Eggers, who also wrote the dumb book it’s based on), don’t have people on screen be agog at shit the movie’s audience wouldn’t be. Unless it’s for a joke, which it’s not in The Circle’s case.

To demonstrate Bailey’s belief in openness, Mae wears a camera to broadcast her entire boring-as-fuck life, and supposedly receives tons of followers. There is no debate in the movie of whether this is a good idea, or even the idea if that it’s such a great idea, why doesn’t Bailey do it? It’s because logic and reason would swamp the leaky raft of a plot. 

The Circle’s story can only exist in a bubble of extreme stupidity. It needed to do a hell of a lot better job making its premise even seem plausible, that the benefits of giving up privacy actually has some appeal. The movie fails at this, so I sat there thinking with every scene, “Why would anyone do that? How does anyone think this will turn out well?” 

It doesn’t, but the movie plods on. Mae uses another TED Talk to demonstrate a project that allows people to find someone through crowd-sourcing. In other words, mobs of people join in on a manhunt with no proof that the hunt is a good idea. Oh, and they live broadcast the manhunt. First a criminal. Then, her antler-loving friend who went off the grid to avoid her after she publicized his hideous “art” and animal-rights activists started chasing him. This is fucking embarrassing moviemaking, the nadir of a shitty movie. First, that the movie wants us to suspend disbelief long enough to think anyone would believe this is a good idea. Second, that the supposed heroine of this movie is so fucking weak and pathetic that she’d agree to this. Third, that the movie thinks we’ll be surprised when it all goes badly. Fourth, that when a mob descends on this poor guy and forces him to swerve off a bridge and die that there would be no repercussions other than Mae feels a little bad and goes home to sleep it off in her parents’ house. The boy is forgotten, and we’re supposed to be worried about her.

Fuck her. She’s an awful person. Fuck the moviemakers. They’re awful people for thinking they’ve earned any compassion at all for her.

Mae mopes for a while, then with about five minutes left in the movie, she concocts her revenge: a sour, unsatisfying Cleveland Steamer onto the chest of the audience. In two minutes of direct exposition, she summarizes what anyone with half a brain already knew before they went into this movie. Then, she hosts another TED Talk where she exposes all the private information about the company’s leaders, including their super secret e-mails. Oh no! Who would have guessed the man profiting off of all this data collection wouldn’t want to be exposed themselves? Anyone who has ever seen a movie before, that’s who.

She could have just as easily deleted all the information about everyone in the world that the company holds, but this fucking movie isn’t smart enough for a resolution like that. It doesn’t give a fuck about the boy who died or all the people. It cares about Mae Holland. And she’s a dumb asshole.

Fuck her, she's a terrible person. Fuck this movie. One Finger for the Circle.