The circle 2017 movie#

I’m just the vessel!” Honestly, Chris, do you! And hallelu! …The real talks are REAL I really mean it when I say glory to God - because everything that I did accomplish on the show that people are feeling or vibing or seeing in me? That’s all God, honey. In an interview with Dallas-based publication Central Track, Sapphire said, “God is the rock in my life, and I’m honestly just a puppet. Sapphire shows that there’s a space for LGBTQ folks to still celebrate themselves and have faith- and truly, we rarely see that on TV! What they’ve ended up with is farcical.Dallas-native Chris Sapphire sashays with perfect make-up and attitude, and proudly proclaims his love for his family and God. His whole story has the feel of a drastic last-minute studio intervention either to maximize his character’s screen time or to minimize it. I defy anyone to define even basic biographical information about Boyega’s character. He’s sort of the company’s founder, but he’s in hiding, except he’s always hanging around the campus, but no one seems to recognize him, but then he pops back up to look disappointed in Mae, and then to help her, and then … I give up. The Star Wars actor has such natural, easy charm that you keep waiting for his character to make even a grain of sense. (Also: Why does Bailey initially take such an interest in Mae? The movie’s so choppily put together that it’s impossible to say.)Īnd poor John Boyega.

The circle 2017 movie#

As much as Hanks tries to give his nice-guy CEO darker shadings, he’s a mostly incoherent character, there to make big speeches when the movie requires one, but never built up enough to be the true villain the movie’s climax wants him to be. The movie is baffling in still other ways. They look like the plot contrivances they really are. But under the harsh constraints of a three-act movie, these inventions look gimmicky and basic. He could come up with an idea like SeeChange or SoulSearch (which is a program that can find any person on the planet within 10 minutes, whether or not they want to be found), and the reader could draw his own connections to Brave New World or 1984. Watson is an actress adrift here, and the audience can’t help but float away with her.Īnother issue is that, in the novel, Eggers could let allusion do a lot of the work for him. Is she a dreamer? A skeptic? A convert? A devious conniver? A true believer? I have no idea, and you won’t either. Watson is an earnest young actress, sometimes to a fault she hasn’t quite shaken that Hermione-esque eagerness to please, which leaves her stranded in a film that hasn’t figured out who she’s supposed to be playing. The movie seems to have a lot of things it wants to say about technology, but it hasn’t thought them, or its main character, through all that carefully. And just when the movie is starting to settle into a logical arc for Mae, it shifts suddenly, turning her into, out of nowhere, a blatant social media exhibitionist, with no set-up or payoff. Is she a brave, regular person battling the impending lurch of technology? Or is she actually the perfect fit for The Circle’s particular brand of cultism? Beats me, which is a problem in a movie in which everyone is either a salt-of-the-earth, nature-loving, makes-stuff-with-their-hands technophobe or a social media pod person. One of the many problems with The Circle is that it never gets much of a handle on Mae. I defy anyone to define even basic biographical information about Boyega’s character.Īt least I think she’s wary. She takes a job with The Circle, a Facebook-crossed-with-Google-like corporation whose goal is to “elegantly streamline the chaos of the Web,” which basically boils down to owning every financial transaction and, ultimately, the having ability to handle all governmental-type tasks. It stars Watson as Mae, a digital babe-in-the-woods worried about her ailing father (Paxton) and her off-the-digital-grid platonic love interest Mercer (Ellar Coltrane, from Boyhood). Part of the problem is that the movie doesn’t know what it’s about it keeps changing its mind and losing focus. Everything is set up perfectly for The Circle. It is a film of the moment, about surveillance and oversharing and living in virtual world devoid of human connection. It’s directed by James Ponsoldt (who made the excellent The Spectacular Now and the intriguing The End of the Tour), co-written by Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers (based off Eggers’s novel), and features a dream cast, from Emma Watson to Tom Hanks to John Boyega to Patton Oswalt to Bill Paxton, in his final film performance. The Circle is a big honking sloppy mess of a movie, one that flops around so aimlessly that it’s baffling so many intelligent people had a hand in making it.