Carrie and Elyse went to a panel on the Gothic Resurgence at RT, and afterwards, Carrie described this movie as “kinda Gothic!” and I thought “Hm, let’s do a science.” Reader, READER, it’s sort of yes but also a bunch of other things and mostly this movie is just a lot of wasted potential and also Emma Watson’s eyebrow acting.

Emma Watson is Mae, a girl from a lower class (working? Blue collar? lower middle class?) family who gets a job with a company that is TOTALLY not a mashup of Apple and Google called “The Circle.” People have a TrueYou account (like Google+, but actually functional?) that is connected to all of their social media and email and shopping accounts, so as a result, this company has an obscene amount of information at its disposal.  They invent a tiny, wireless camera so everything can be observed at all times, and the company is full of people without any work-life balance. There are hints of government conspiracies and people deciding the live-stream their entire lives all the time (called being 100% transparent). John Boyega is the guy who invented TrueYou but doesn’t like how Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt have used his invention, and Karen Gillan is Mae’s best friend and the person who helped her get the job and if all of this sounds like a confused mess, that would be because it is.

It’s kind of Gothic in that there’s a winsome heroine who gets sucked into this big place that seems great but then things get ominous, and she slowly figures out that there might be a madwoman in the attic, but instead of making a run for it, she decides that maybe the madwoman in the attic isn’t so bad. Whatever.

I think this movie wanted to be a warning about the amount of information we are handing over to companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook, and it wanted to be a scathing indictment about the mass hysteria that social media can influence, but it never figured out what it really wanted to do with those two things, and as a resulted, wasted a bunch of time and a lot of talent.

Look, casting Tom Hanks was a brilliant movie. It’s Tom Hanks! He’s America’s Best Friend! He uses Twitter to help lost things find their owners! Of course he’s on the up and up as your friendly neighborhood Steve Jobs! He’s simultaneously playing with his type and against it, and Tom Hanks is good enough to be able to pull that off.

Emma Watson, though, is not that good. When faced with trying to convey emotion, she relies on moving her eyebrows up and down a lot, and when she’s alone with Tom Hanks, she’s so outclassed, it’s not ever fair. Sorry guys, but I don’t think Emma Watson is a very good actress, and she’s particularly not great here.

It doesn’t help that she’s given a bunch of things to do that have no connection to a character arc. Mae makes this jump from, “I don’t really think about the internet knowing my business” to “Secrets are lies, and not sharing your experiences with the world is a form of theft so privacy shouldn’t exist” with no real indication of how she went from Point A to Point L. Sure, she discovers that there’s positive reinforcement to having social media followers, but this is ridiculous.  It’s like they cut about twenty minutes out of the middle and didn’t worry about if that affected the plot at all.

This movie is also a total waste of John Boyega. I love him! I want him in lots more things (not all the things, because I want him to have a good work life balance so he can continue to be in lots more things) and I do not want his talent and handsome face WASTED. There’s a bunch of stuff that could have been (I know in the book that his character and Mae have a relationship, and there’s none of that here except some flirting which only works because Boyega has chemistry to SPARE), but mostly he wanders around looking troubled and worried but doesn’t DO much.

It’s a waste.

It’s also nice to see Karen Gillan getting more roles, and in her native Scottish accent. Again, there’s this jump where she goes from being one of the 40 most influential people in the company to having a breakdown and not being all in on what the Circle does. Like, her hair grows 6 inches, so there’s missing time, but seriously. Where did it go? What happened?

They did spend a lot of money on the Circle campus: it’s huge and as Watson and Gillan are walking through on a very fast tour, it’s clear that this is one of those places that has catering and Doga (yoga with dogs) and climbing wall and dorms and a night club because they don’t want their employees to have a work-life balance. They just don’t, and Allison Green of Ask a Manager would tell you to be VERY SURE you know what you’re walking into with an employer like that. Also, since this is the heart of the Bay Area tech corridor, a lot of the supporting characters aren’t white- so, steps in the right direction there. Lots of young, excited, energetic tech people. Honestly, it’s exhausting to even think about in my old age.

Other things that I hated: Mae is part of a product launch called “SoulSearch” which is designed to basically put out an APB on people you are looking for, and everyone who is hooked into the Circle tech will starting looking for that person- which Reddit and Twitter does now with terrible results (it doesn’t work better in the movie). Mae is live-streaming her entire life, and we see some of the messages and comments that people make, but they’re completely unrealistic. The filmmakers (who are dudes) don’t seem to even realize that as a woman livestreaming her life, she’d be subjected to dick pics and harassment and threats and general misogyny beyond anything they could possibly imagine.

This is just such a pointless mess that has no idea what it’s message is, what the plot is, or what the point of any of it is. Don’t waste your time. Karen Gillan is way better served in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxEzUgoCF3w

The Circle is in theaters now and tickets (US) are available at Fandango and Moviefone.