Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: What. The. Hell. Was. That.

“The Circle” has one thing and only one thing going for it.  There are some beautiful scenes of Emma Watson kayaking near the Golden Gate Bridge and various other natural landscapes.  Yet somehow, it even manages to ruin that.  This is a complete mess of a movie.

Let’s focus on the characters.  Or should I say programmable robots?  Because I’m not sure human beings were used in the filming of this movie.  Characters need motives and reasons for their actions while this movie has them completely changing personality from scene to scene with little to no explanation.  Mae (Emma Watson) goes from questioning the culture of the company to completely drinking the kool-aid for the company culture and does so after literally having a conversation with another questioner of the company, Ty (John Boyega), in which they mock the whole kool-aid drinking culture.  Mae got the job because of her best friend Annie (Karen Gillan) who starts as a workaholic high level exec and immediately changes to being Mae’s enemy and suffers a nervous breakdown and questions everything about the company.  Ty, who is supposed to be super brilliant, stands powerless as he watches all this stuff he rails against happen even though it’s within his power to change everything pretty much at any time, but he waits for Mae to have a change of conscious in order to do so.

There’s supposed to be a moral to this story, I’m sure, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.  As best I can tell, the moral is “Technology is good…sometimes?” or perhaps “Privacy is good…sometimes?”.  To which I can only reply, “Thank you, Captain Obvious!”  And those question marks definitely belong because the movie leaves no clear answer.  About anything.  There is no depth to the story as it tries to beat you over the head with these morals through painful scene after painful scene.  You end up not giving a damn about any of the characters at all because of it, even Mae’s dad who has MS.

I can think of many things you would enjoy more than going to see “The Circle”.  Get that root canal that you’ve been putting off.  Spend some time with your racist uncle.  Take a tour of a wastewater treatment facility.  Read the entirety of Trumps Twitter account.  Whatever it is, you’ve made a better decision than my seeing “The Circle”.