Something That's Round

.

This is a movie review of the film called The Circle. When you write a movie review, first you go somewhere and you watch a movie. You could watch the movie at home too, maybe. Both are possible. Then you go home, if you have gone out anyway, and you think about the movie some. And then you write the review. That is how movie reviewers usually write movie reviews. A movie review usually begins with the reviewer telling the people reading the review what the movie they are reviewing is called. So this is a movie review of The Circle.

Wasn't that paragraph exhausting? Then you know how I felt after watching The Circle, which is nothing but tell and no show. The Circle stars the lovely and talented Emma Watson as something called "Mae," which is the antithesis of a human being - "Mae" veers so wildly from smiley face emoticon to frowny face emoticon depending on the absurd immediate needs of the... I hesitate to use the word "plot." The inconsistent arrangement of happenings?

First happening: this Mae thing gets a job at the social media godhead called The Circle. And over the course of the next one hundred minutes Mae's attitude towards The Monolithic Horror of The Internet will depend on who she's talking to, or whether she ate a blueberry muffin that day or not I guess - who knows? Certainly not this movie. 

The one consistency is all the characters will stand around and talk about what they are doing, without ever actually really doing anything. I suppose the movie in that way echoes actual social media, but it's like an Instagram account filled with pictures of inspirational platitudes. It completely misunderstands its platform. The Circle is a movie. As such, it should show us moving pictures. There are ideas here that, if they had actually been turned into action, could have become something worth watching. Show us people living in a world where this social media platform has taken over. Give us a story about characters surviving that. 

That I even have to write "give us a story about characters" tells you all you need to know about The Circle. 

.