She plays Mae, who works as a temp for a water company and drives a crappy old car. She has an admirer in Mercer who fixes her car and doesn’t realise he has no chance. Mae gets a job at tech company ‘The Circle’ thanks to her friend Karen Gillen who sets up the interview.
The job is basically customer service, but soon the inevitable creepiness starts to appear. The Circle demands full access to all employee details and expects them to socialise within the company. Mae is resistant at first but when she sees the benefits, such as medical care for her sick father, she buys in.
Her enthusiasm is noted by company supremo Tom Hanks and CEO Patton Oswalt. Neither of these two are overly involved and Hanks looks like he filmed his scenes in a single afternoon.
Mae meets John Boyega off ‘Star Wars’, who seemed a bit miscast as the tech genius behind some of The Circle’s products, and he warns her of getting in too deep. Mae doesn’t listen and gets wired up for 24 hour webcam exposure to promote the company’s new ‘See Change’ technology. Later innovations such as compulsory voter registration via The Circle make us a bit uneasy and when Mercer dies in a company stunt, Mae has to reevaluate her commitment to the company.
Can this once temp worker bring down the multi-national tech company with help form the Star Wars guy? Are the company really evil and is the message really going to be that blunt? You Bet!
This film started out OK but as soon as Mae steals the kayak it goes downhill. The message about privacy was hammered home with a sledgehammer, with the tech company basically planning to record everything we ever say or do. Hanks was a bit one note and I wasn’t sure if he was meant to be evil or just misguided. Watson was OK but had a lot of heavy lifting to do and I really didn’t care for her journey. The peer pressure was well realised, but I was expecting a big reveal that she’d been brainwashed when she really just got caught up in the hype.
The guy playing Mercer looked like he found the part in a cereal box and Boyega’s ‘deep throat’ character was a waste of time. Some scenes ran too long and I felt like I’d spent days in the auditorium watching product demos - buy ‘The Circle’ products! It did look like there had been a big change of plan midway by the production as Karen Gillan’s character went from high-flyer to mentalist in the blink of an eye.
It was sad to see Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly as Mae’s parents, as they were both dead within a year of this film coming out. Paxton looked terrible and I assumed his character’s MS was the actor’s own. He actually died of a stroke so good performance here Bill!
‘The Circle’ had a hollow ring to it and I didn’t believe the public’s buy in to their shenanigans, which weren’t really evil just a bit invasive. If you want to watch something about an shady tech company watch ‘Devs’ instead of this - that’s got Ron Swanson in it too. This one was over long and under developed.
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