This movie is an exploration of our modern online "black mirror" culture, this time focusing on large corporations (think Google, Apple and Facebook) that are forcing us to publicly live our lives online.
It's a slick, snazzy movie with good production values, a good script and decent acting. Emma Watson's skills and amiability are on full display here.
At The Circle, "transparency" is pushed as a public good, even though it really serves corporate purposes. We see in this film how far it can go.
This movie is like "Nerve". "Nerve" looked at online anonymity, sensation-seeking and desensitisation; this movie looks at the slippery slope between "transparency" and totalitarianism.
The Circle is ultimately a creepy place where the employees are forced to live their lives online in a way that comes across eventually as malevolent and overly intrusive.
Our heroine is apparently one of the few who are not using the internet for romantic or sexual purposes. She seems to have no tension between her online (non-existent?) sex life and her online public life. No wonder Tom Hanks loves her.
Of course, the rest of us do have that problem. There is a good deal of tension between our online sex lives (which we want to keep private) and our online public lives (which we are willing to share). If the good people at The Circle are going to make everything completely transparent with the assistance of millions of cheap mini-cameras, it's going to have to deal with the fact that 90% of the internet is being used to get off.
This is the creepy horror of the internet for many of us: Facebook and Google are going to blithely reveal our dick/boob pics, our sexts, our sex vids, our porn preferences, our kinks and our f*ck dates to our families and employers.
This movie presents that issue in a single but hugely important scene. The line is briefly crossed. But it is not her sex life that ends up being made public. It is her parents. OMG, America is horrified. People are having sex!! What's hypocritical about this scene is that it avoids the main issue, and deflects it into an issue about respecting your parents' privacy.
This online tension between anonymity and transparency is a huge topic. But this movie does not do it justice, in my view.
And of course there is also the problem -- which the movie deals with in detail -- that some people simply don't want to be online all the time. Some of us don't want their lives to be transparent. What do we do with them? I think this movie addresses a huge anxiety of the selfie generation. They need anonymity; but they are also afraid of not being watched. It's admittedly a very strange situation. How did our society end up like this?
I think this movie is worth 7.5, but I'm going to round it down because I don't like how it dealt with sex.
It's a slick, snazzy movie with good production values, a good script and decent acting. Emma Watson's skills and amiability are on full display here.
At The Circle, "transparency" is pushed as a public good, even though it really serves corporate purposes. We see in this film how far it can go.
This movie is like "Nerve". "Nerve" looked at online anonymity, sensation-seeking and desensitisation; this movie looks at the slippery slope between "transparency" and totalitarianism.
The Circle is ultimately a creepy place where the employees are forced to live their lives online in a way that comes across eventually as malevolent and overly intrusive.
Our heroine is apparently one of the few who are not using the internet for romantic or sexual purposes. She seems to have no tension between her online (non-existent?) sex life and her online public life. No wonder Tom Hanks loves her.
Of course, the rest of us do have that problem. There is a good deal of tension between our online sex lives (which we want to keep private) and our online public lives (which we are willing to share). If the good people at The Circle are going to make everything completely transparent with the assistance of millions of cheap mini-cameras, it's going to have to deal with the fact that 90% of the internet is being used to get off.
This is the creepy horror of the internet for many of us: Facebook and Google are going to blithely reveal our dick/boob pics, our sexts, our sex vids, our porn preferences, our kinks and our f*ck dates to our families and employers.
This movie presents that issue in a single but hugely important scene. The line is briefly crossed. But it is not her sex life that ends up being made public. It is her parents. OMG, America is horrified. People are having sex!! What's hypocritical about this scene is that it avoids the main issue, and deflects it into an issue about respecting your parents' privacy.
This online tension between anonymity and transparency is a huge topic. But this movie does not do it justice, in my view.
And of course there is also the problem -- which the movie deals with in detail -- that some people simply don't want to be online all the time. Some of us don't want their lives to be transparent. What do we do with them? I think this movie addresses a huge anxiety of the selfie generation. They need anonymity; but they are also afraid of not being watched. It's admittedly a very strange situation. How did our society end up like this?
I think this movie is worth 7.5, but I'm going to round it down because I don't like how it dealt with sex.
