The Circle

That feeling you get when you are offered a position of a hotline operator and you are completely ecstatic. But I had no idea what the Circle company was about. Otherwise, I was rather disappointed. The whole idea of the movie seems to me naive rather than interesting. It goes to the absolute extreme where people are the perfect sheep and social networks go through a perfect recession. On top of that, Emma Watson’s acting is so believable that no matter what she did I would be shocked. And that’s actually what happened. (18.02.2018)

Interesting in places and makes you think about halfway through (the election), but in the end it is still a predictable routine with a sniffing finale, in which you will learn everything in a few dozen minutes. I would expect something bolder than such a simple critique of all those internets. Tom Hanks was great, Emma Watson less so... And John Boyega's character? Deus ex machina, nothing else. (03.02.2019)

The idea of gathering information and exploiting it is a rather difficult, extensive and complex thing to film, and The Circle fails at this task - just as I expected. Emma Watson and Tom Hanks are fine, but they don't impress significantly, and, actually, if the film had any other actors I wouldn't have bothered. The execution is rather superficial, devoid of suspense and unable to make the viewer feel interested in the development of the story, as if the director had the main premise but didn't know what to pack further into the feature length running time. The result is a rather skippable affair with a lacklustre finale, and I don't see why they wanted to film this so much... (13.01.2023)

I was looking forward to a demonic Tom Hanks but it didn’t happen! The plot about installing Big Brother in every household wasn’t bad, but the film ends at the very moment when it could at last have started to operate in the nicely presented world. Emma Watson is pleasantly down to earth, but that’s more or less it. P.S. I liked the clean design of all of the apps shown. (18.04.2020)

After spending two hours on things that a proper thriller would use as a starting point or additional motifs, The Circle’s plot ends at the moment when a proper thriller would only start to escalate. I commend the fact that the film points out the loss of privacy and corporatism of today’s interconnected world, but the way it does this is transparent and naive. At least Emma Watson is nice to look at. Her sober acting give the film some character, thus saving it. (11.05.2017)