The Circle: Who's Watching Who?

This film doesn't really do much in terms of a movie but it does on the other hand prove that just because you have a great cast, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll have a great movie.

The fact that it got hardly any screen time yet stars like Tom Hanks, John Boyega and Emma Watson appear in it is unusual.

Mae Holland [Emma Watson] lands an interview with The Circle thanks to her friend Annie [Karen Gillan]. She obviously aces the interview and ends up working for the world’s most powerful internet company. The Circle uses the concepts from Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook and also touches on a new level of Vlogging and Blogging to create an eerily accurate picture of what our future may look like.

The idea is that their customers buy into The Circle with their TruYou identity which grants them access to a variety of social connections conceivable in our digital universe. This then results in everyone knowing what everyone is doing, who they're with including their health...because that's not a major breach of privacy right there.

So Mae, as one does, goes 'Transparent' and carries around a very small camera with her which is attached to her shirt. So this means that billions of people can see what she is doing 24/7...minus the bathroom, etc. - thank god.

So Bailey [Tom Hanks] and Stenton [Patton Oswalt] are the leaders and set-up cameras everywhere in the world to catch and find missing people and criminals within 20 minutes. Now whilst this concept is pretty darn cool and could make you feel safer, you can see where you could draw the line between this and invasion of privacy.

This is clearly shown when Mae's only 'non-Circle' friend gets followed by drones and people chasing him in cars, streaming him live to billions of people globally. The friend Mercer [Ellar Coltrane] is the only realistic character that we can actually relate to which brings this film back down to reality and somewhat good. The consequences of this tech-obsessed world then comes to a halt when a tragic event happens, but this doesn't last long.

Emma and Tom (when given the right role) are fine actors/actresses, in fact, two of my favourite, yet in this they are both  incredibly monotone, boring and just unbearable to actually watch. So trying to comment on Tom's acting is pretty hard when you don't have much to go on, the same applies to John. Emma on the other hand is good, but not great. Her accent is bearable at times but its not perfect. At the end of the day they could have casted ANYONE to play the role...like an actual American.

From the trailer, I expected Ty [John Boyega] to have a major role where he would exposed the company and show Mae what The Circle was really like. Then queue Bailey who tries to stop them and gets exposed and BOOM - there's your film...mehhh not so much. But I won't spoil it for you.

It's kind of like advertising a 2-hour movie, but then making Tom and John the two main actors and giving them about 5-10 minutes of screen time COMBINED - oh wait...

Overall this movie was pretty rubbish BUT does have a fab plot/idea that could have been amazing if done right (not that I'm an expert). But, if you have a pre-order you may as well cancel it as many did and wait to see if for free as it is on Netflix. So to the question of who's watching who...according to this movie its they're watching YOU...just maybe you might not want to waste your time watching them. However, I do encourage you to watch it and form you own opinion. Watch the trailer HERE.

Rating: 3/5

Running Time: 1hr 49 minutes

Genre: Drama, Mystery & Suspense