Although I will admit that Emma Watson is a beautiful actress - and rightfully deserved to play the role of Belle in the recent live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast - I still have not seen much evidence of her acting skills being transcendent. In The Circle, Watson plays Mae Holland, a young woman who gets hired by a conglomerate communications corporation headed by the Steve Jobs-like Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), who somehow thinks it's ok to film every single person for every second of every day, using new revolutionary tiny cameras whose video quality is so good that it's mind-bending (and of course, never truly explained) why they would be so inexpensive to purchase.
The movie treads the universal-surveillance-versus-personal-privacy issue with such confidence that one would think it's actually saying something groundbreaking about our technologically and social media dependent society, but alas, its screenplay is way too dull and immature for its themes to resonate at all after the credits have rolled. A scene involving Mae's friend Mercer (Ellar Coltrane) being harassed by common citizens as they film him obnoxiously with their smart phones is especially cruel to watch, and even more devastating is the scene's outcome, which is telegraphed well in advance.
The Circle is pure trash - unfunny, unwise, and just plain stale - masquerading as profound social commentary on our modern techno times, and downright laughable all the way to its ridiculously dull climax.
D-
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