BEFORE: This one's simple, Tom Hanks carries over from "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" - but still, it was a long road getting here. I've been semi-curious about this one since it was released in 2017, and I never saw it listed on any of the premium cable channels. Perhaps it was On Demand, but naturally I like to avoid paying for those movies if I don't have to, I'll only do that if a film I like and I've seen but don't have a copy of, and would help fill up a DVD with another similar film, makes a return appearance there, because that sort of feels like my last chance to grab it, and maybe that's worth $2.99 or $3.99. But this one was MIA for a long time, not on Netflix or Hulu or anything - umm, unless maybe I misssed it. Finally I spotted it on Amazon Prime a few months ago and made a note of that, and of course it then takes me a few more months to find a slot for it. But since it's helping me out of a linking jam, then all is sort of forgiven.
THE PLOT: A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called The Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all humanity.
AFTER: I've been binge-watching "The Vow" on HBO, which is all about that NXIVM cult that sprung up near Albany a few years back, and finally made the news in 2017 when it was revealed that some Hollywood actresses had been recruiting for the organization's inner circle, which involved getting branded with the leader's initials and swearing a vow of sexual obedience or something (I'm still fuzzy on some details, I'm halfway through and they're parceling out the information like little food pellets). But what's evident is how their leader, Keith Raniere, was a captivating personality who seemed to be extremely smart in talking about science and human behaviors, but also used the elements of religion, multi-level marketing and also torture tactics to keep everyone around him both mentally and physically dependent. It's like if you mixed scientology with TED talks and threw in some Pokemon collecting - namely those colored scarves that marked the rise of members through the organization. Perhaps that more closely resembles the colored belts you get while studying karate, but who wouldn't want to rise more quickly through the ranks to get those neat scarves, like the green one with the stripes?
And paying for all those "courses", only to be told when you complete ten courses that the threshold to reach the next level is now fifteen courses, so get out there in the world and earn some more money so you can complete five more and move up a level. But if you recruit ten more members, maybe we'll give you a discount on those next five courses. Become a mentor or a prefect, and then you'll really be making some progress, plus you'll get the next scarf color AND have five "slaves" giving you their collateral. Get up at 5 am, have a low-calorie breakfast, teach a class, take a class, singing rehearsal, skip lunch, recruiting time, more classes, more rehearsals, more recruiting, and then you better not miss the 11 pm volleyball game if you want to hear what our esteemed leader has to say today. Get to bed by 1 am and repeat.
And I see a bit of that pattern reflected here in "The Circle", a film in which the lead character takes a new job at a technology company and makes jokes about "drinking the Kool-Aid" with the cooler members of the staff. Most of her co-workers, however, are hooked on the Kool-Aid without being aware of it, because the Google-like campus of The Circle has everything they need, from the smoothie bar to the spa to the ping-pong tables and even weekend activities for those who live on campus - why on Earth would anybody need or want to leave work? More to the point, is anybody around here getting any work done? It almost doesn't matter, because soon everybody will be working for the Circle, or have a Circle account, or be a Circler in some way. So is this supposed to be Google, or Facebook, or Amazon? I suppose yes, yes, and yes, but also maybe no?
The main imagineer hosts "Dream Fridays", where attendance in the giant conference hall isn't exactly mandatory, but come on, it probably totally is. Here the company announces its latest plans for world domination - sorry, its latest products, and how they're going to help take over the world - sorry again, how they're going to help make life better for everybody. Tom Hanks here plays the guy who's part Steve Jobs, part Jeff Bezos and maybe part Elon Musk. (StevElon JoBezosk?). When we first see him, he's pitching "SeeChange", which is a series of tiny, camouflaged movie cameras that resemble glass marbles, which can be stuck to any surface in, say, a remote European country in danger of being invaded by Soviets or taken over by an oppressive regime, but now the world has 24/7 remote access to that country, so the world is watching, and therefore the news of any international crimes like this can be reported on immediately from across the globe. What could possibly be wrong with this? Well, a few things - like who's watching? And on whose authority? What makes that entity the world's police?
The theory is that once everything is visible, nothing can be hidden, therefore no crime - but does that logic really pan out? If somebody can create this new camera tech, somebody else can invent counter-tech, or a way around it, like a drone that would float around and find the cameras, then disable them. But don't listen to me, you just go ahead with your little presentation. Plus, don't we already have this sort of technology, now that everybody has a camera on their damn phone? How's that working out for us? If everybody has the ability to record crime, between phones and police body-cams, then there shouldn't be any more inappropriate police shootings, right? Yeah, so I don't think this is going to work out. As a Guppy (that's a new employee at The Circle), Mae circulates at one of their parties and talks to people who are similarly trying to solve problems like child abduction by having tracking chips implanted into infants' bones. Sure, because that's worked so well with putting microchips into pets - they still run away and get hit by cars, you know. Plus it's only going to lead to kidnappers hurting the kids in order to get the chips out, like cutting off their limbs. Jeez, it's like nobody at this company thinks a situation through via the worst-case scenario or something.
But as she works her way up from customer service rep (?) to essentially being the face of the company, Mae does come up with some ideas that are relevant to this year's current events. In a brainstorming session regarding voting, it's noted that the largest segment of the voting-eligible U.S. population is the segment that doesn't vote. We all know that if this group of people could be motivated, they could have an enormous impact on any election. Since the vast majority of these non-voters have Circle accounts, it leads to a question - why not work with the state and federal governments to allow people to vote on-line, through their accounts? It's a valid question, one might as well ask why we don't allow people to vote through Facebook or Twitter? Right now, the answer is - because many of those accounts don't represent real people. Remember the Russian TwitterBots? Fake Facebook posts? All you need to start a Facebook account is a phony name, some photos and a valid e-mail address. So that's just not going to work. The internet is still like the Wild West - or perhaps more like Westworld, a place where people go to escape reality and be whoever they want to be, and opening the election up to online voting could allow more voter fraud than ever before.
Mae and The Circle executives double down on the idea, though - what if voting was made mandatory to maintain your social media account? What if people could pay their parking tickets online? (Umm, I think you already can...). I filed for unemployment online in April, even though many people had problems getting through to the NYS Dept. of Labor web-site - I think I can now reveal a secret, many of those people were using browsers that were too advanced, which is why they kept encountering crashes on the antiquated New York State government site. My wife noticed, way down at the bottom of the page, a recommendation for which browser to use, and it was an OLD one, which she just happened to have a copy of on her computer. So there you go, we got through because we tend to not upgrade our software unless we absolutely have to, I knew that would pay off someday. If you allow your computer to auto-upgrade your software, you're going to pay a price.
Time passes, and a California Senator comes forward, allowing The Circle to grant access to all of her e-mails and social media posts - but this plotline doesn't really go anywhere. Mae gets in trouble for breaking into a kayak rental company in the middle of the night and this somehow leads her to living a "Truman Show" kind of existence, wearing a body-cam and allowing millions of followers to track her daily activities. Yeah, there are quite a few things wrong with this, like we all still need our privacy - it's not like there are freaks out there on the internet who just want to watch her during intimate moments, like trying on clothes or bathroom breaks, right? Oh, wait. Then Mae assists with the launch of the company's new features, which use crowd-sourcing techniques to track down wanted felons - nope, no danger there, not at all. Regular people catching killers on camera, what could possibly go wrong?
Maybe it's just the long anticipation that resulted from not having access to this film for three years after its release - but I don't think it lives up to that hype, or any hype. There are a few half-formed ideas here that never really come together into a coherent story. The Circle and its products are good, until they aren't - that's not much of a plotline. And again, whose arc is this meant to represent? Steve Jobs was alternately a genius and the devil during his career, now I think in retrospect we've pretty much settled on genius. (Umm, right?). Jeff Bezos was hailed as a hero for a long while, when Amazon was getting everybody the books, movies and, well, everything they needed with 2-day shipping, but after the reception Amazon got in New York City last year, and all the reports of how they mistreat their employees, I think the story may have changed. Elon Musk was similarly hailed for promoting electric cars, but now he's just a stoner with a fixation on space travel, and that hardly seems like an improvement from the people in the cheap seats.
So, once we come out of this pandemic, where are we going to find ourselves, technologically speaking? Who are the new inventors and innovators of the near-future, and is anybody going to care about them? Now that we have drones taking video of everything so we can all just sit at home and watch our streaming services, and get every kind of food delivered to our door, what's even left to invent? Once we have 5G speeds, is anything going to be better, or are we just going to get the same crap delivered to us even faster?
NITPICK POINT: Mae meets and befriends the creator of True You, a Circle product that has grown beyond its creator's control, and he's still hanging around the campus in a sort of freelance "big thinker" position. But the film never tells us what True You is, or what it does, or why he's unhappy about it. Could the screenwriter just not be bothered to come up with something? And if he's unhappy with the company, why the heck is he still there? Just another tangential plotline that goes nowhere, apparently.
Also starring Emma Watson (last seen in "Little Women"), John Boyega (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "Stuber"), Ellar Coltrane (last seen in "Boyhood"), Patton Oswalt (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "Frailty"), Glenne Headly (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Nate Corddry (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Mamoudou Athie (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Julian von Nagel, Amie McCarthy Winn, Amir Talai (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Elvy Yost, Lauren Baldwin, Nicola Bertram, Jimmy Wong, Ellen Wong (last seen in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"), Smith Cho, Poorna Jagannathan, Judy Reyes, Eve Gordon (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Andrea Brooks, Frederick Koehler (last seen in "The Pick-Up Artist"), with a cameo from Beck (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon").
RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of Soylent (how that drink company stays in business with THAT name, I have no idea...)
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