-Written by guest reviewer Ashley Green
I need to address a societal oversight, one I am worried will affect too many movies in the future. Emma Watson isn’t a good actor. At her best she is Hermione Granger and at her worst she is an American. The minimal gray area between those characters is where she plays bridge and waits to be cast as another breathy and restless twenty-something she can bore us to death with. I feel like it should be said that as a person, I find Emma Watson to be articulate and lovely. I’m not projecting a strange hate for EDubs with this review, I’m only saying that I don’t think she’s Belle talented, okay? It should also be said that I am in love with Keanu Reeves so my opinion doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that I’m going to spoil the shit out of this movie, so if you really want to watch it (which I 100% do not suggest if quality cinematic experience is something you enjoy), stop reading here.
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The Circle focuses on Mae Holland (Emma Watson), a breathy and restless twenty-something who works for the water company. Outside of her love for solo kayaking, her family’s struggle with her father Vinnie’s (goddamn it, you deserved better Bill Paxton) MS, and her weird, dismissive friendship with Mercer (Ellar Coltrane), we see that Mae is very bored with her life and feels unfulfilled. Then, at out nowhere, Mae gets an interview at The Circle courtesy of Annie (Karen Gillan), her Scottish BFF, which instantly breaks the monotony of Mae’s life. We are introduced to an intricate world of technology interwoven with the human experience where everything is recorded and archived. Literally everything. Employees spend all of their time at The Circle; they work there, they party there, they live there. It is essentially its own little world. You got health inquiries? Cool, head to the medical building and get yourself a fancy little bracelet that monitors your very existence. Want to put a tracking device in your kid? Awesome. Just cross “campus” and they’ll pop a tracker right into your child’s bone, no problem. Want to see a live performance by fucking Beck? Great! Just frolic through the garden towards the designated concert area and gyrate the night away! And if you’re lucky, you’ll bump into the creator of it all, Ty (hot piece of ace John Boyega) and he’ll pull a bottle of wine out of a bush, tell you all of his secrets, and then basically disappear from the movie altogether! The Circle is everything and newly hired Mae gets to be part of it. What Mae doesn’t know is that incredibly likable Eamon (Tom Hanks) and less-than-likable Tom (Patton Oswalt) are two ginormous turds who can’t wait to invade the fuck out of the world’s privacy. Or does she?
The idea of The Circle is not a bad idea. In fact, it’s a really good idea and something that, if executed properly, could have freaked me out like The Truman Show did when I was a kid. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t. What we are given is a bloated piece of fiction from a 12th grade creative writing class whose author is a seventeen year old tech nerd who has never talked to a girl but insists on making one his main character. Mae is flat, bland, and actually pretty mean…and she’s kayaking like, all of the time. All of the fucking time. She even steals a kayak in the middle of the night and paddles out into the foggy San Francisco bay because she is just so overwhelmed with life and UGH, HAS TO KAYAK. It’s here that Mae almost drowns and you’d think that drowning would be a relatively easy thing to pretend to do, but Emma Watson butchers it. Anyway, thanks to the mini cameras that Eamon invents, known as SeeChange, Mae’s life is saved. For some reason there’s three of them stuck to a buoy that just so happens to be focusing on Mae as she almost gets hit by a huge fucking ship and these three SeeChanges are not only capable of penetrating a blanket of fog, but they are also connected directly to the authorities. Within seconds of flailing about in the ocean, Mae is saved (God forbid one more white girl dies in a tragic midnight kayak accident, am I right?). So Mae is saved and because SeeChange is archived at The Circle, everyone knows about her near-death experience. This is when Eamon and the wildly underused Tom approach her about going “transparent”. She sticks a camera on her shirt, exclaims that "secrets are lies", and begins living her life as a walking, talking live-feed. To make a ridiculously long story short, Mae ruins the lives of everyone she cares about. Her live-feed picks up on her parents banging (and not just banging, but Glenne Headley using a penis pump on Bill Paxton while he talks dirty) and her later invention of SoulSearch, a program that can find literally anyone through the help of people connected to The Circle (think Facebook mixed with Google Earth) kills her “friend” Mercer by causing him to drive his shitty pickup off of a bridge. The good news is Mae mourns him for 4 days and then she’s back at work, live-feed up and running, and decides that exposing Eamon and Tom as the ginormous turds they are is for the good of the people…and also because she just wants to run shit.
The only good storyline within this movie is Annie’s, and I might be biased because I think Karen Gillan is so goddamn adorable, but whatever. Annie is this workaholic who loves her job, but maybe too much. You get a glimpse into her life and it’s interesting. She’s interesting. But our seventeen-year-old author (actual 47-year-old, and former respected author Dave Eggers) doesn’t give a shit about developing story lines, so he gives her a drug problem and sends her back to Scotland.
I didn’t like The Circle. I think it was a really shitty movie that made me laugh a lot because it just really sucked. The dialogue was bad. The characters were bad. Watching the late and great Bill Paxton shit himself was bad. The random FBI investigation they inserted into the movie to inform you that The Circle was probably definitely breaking privacy laws was bad. The random Judy Reyes aka Nurse Carla from Scrubs cameo was actually pretty good. It’s nice to see her working. But her acting was bad. Basically everything was bad, but some of it was bad in a funny way. Would I watch this again? Sure, if it was turned into a drinking game where everyone had to chug a beer every time there was an unnecessary close up of Emma Watson’s face. That would be a hell of a time! Would I recommend this movie to anyone? Sure, if it was turned into a drinking game where everyone had to chug a beer every time there was an unnecessary close up of Emma Watson’s face. That would be a hell of a time!
D (for Bill Paxton’s dick pump – RIP)
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