Oh man, last thing I remember I was kayaking in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and then yada yada yada, some fog rolls in, I almost die, and then my company’s weirdo all-seeing remote cameras saved my life. Besides that I can’t remember what happened … can you remember what happened in The Circle?
Pop Quiz Hot Shot!
1) Mae (Emma Watson) is a woman working temp jobs and not living up to her potential. How does she get an interview with The Circle, a dystopian tech company run by Patton Oswalt and Tom Hanks?
2) In her first week at the company she meets Ty (Boyega), an introverted and mysterious man on campus. Who is Ty really?
3) What disease does Mae’s father have?
4) Mae has a friend Mercer who is hunted down by Mae’s followers and dies in an accident as a result. Why did Mae and Mercer have a falling out?
5) How does Mae take down The Circle?
Answers
1) She happens to know a Scottish woman named Annie who is very high up in The Circle’s management. She gets Mae a job, and all Mae has to do is knock it out of the park. And knock it out of the park she does.
2) Ty is the developer of The Circle’s central technology, the social platform the entire business is built off of. He’s been mostly cut out of decision making and generally disagrees with what Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt are doing, so he just kind of bums around campus at this point.
3) He has MS. Which was getting worse until he got on that sweet The Circle health plan. And now he’s … well he seems mostly the same, but the doctors assure us he’s doing better.
4) So Mercer was a man’s man. He’s kind of not into technology, and instead fixes cars, and makes things out of wood, and hikes and building chandeliers out of deer antlers (which is doesn’t kill? I guess he buys them from a farm or something). Anyways, Mae posts that sweet chandelier on The Circle, and he starts getting death threats because, you know … they think he killed a bunch of deer. Now, he says he didn’t kill those deer, and he’s none too pleased with Mae’s new friends / company and decides to cut her out of his life.
5) After helping build up what is honestly the most bald-faced dystopian corporate pseudo-government I’ve seen put to film, she has a change of heart and decides to take down the COO and CEO by releasing all of their personal emails worldwide. She them presumably helps Ty rebuild the company into something more true to the spirit of Ty’s original vision. The End.
Oh right, it isn’t that a giant corporation controlling communication is bad, it is just the people who run said corporation that might be bad. But what if Emma Watson ran it? Then it could be good? I don’t know sounds ridiculous, much like The Circle.
Bad Movie Twins 