Film Review: The Circle

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to separate the life of human beings in the global village from technological products, and the development of Internet technology is bound to become an important marker of civilisation in the 21st century. While we enjoy the advances and conveniences of modern technology, do we also have to live with the negative impacts it brings? American author Dave Eggers' 2013 anti-utopian novel The Circle offers much food for thought on this subject.
In recent years, there have been a wide range of films and television productions about internet technology, including the series Black Mirror, developed by British television in 2011, the US TV series Person of Interest, Snowden, which exposed the US NSA's Prism programme, and the 'Netflix' series The Circle". These stories show us that the use of online technology can benefit both ourselves and others, even preventing the abduction of children, eliminating wars and overthrowing tyranny... On the other hand, over-reliance on and misuse of online technology can lead to the loss of privacy and unpredictable disasters in our lives.
Mae Holland (Emma Watson) was recommended by her friend Annie (Karen Gillan) to join The Circle, a company that has developed many web technologies and is the most powerful web technology company in the world. While working hard in the Customer Experience department, Mel is also worried about her father's chronic illness. One day, when she is in a bad mood, she goes out into the bay in a canoe and falls into the sea in a strong wind.
Bailey (Tom Hanks), one of the company's CEOs, takes the opportunity to guide Mel to become the first employee to live-stream her personal life, and she is able to participate in the company's decision making meetings with ease. Then, at a new product launch, a seemingly righteous hunt for a criminal takes a turn for the worse when it turns into a death march for her friend, Mercer (Ellar Coltrane). Mercer comes to his senses and, with the help of the company's founder, Tai, uncovers all of Bailey's secret letters in an alternative way.
The film's technological product launches are the highlight of the film, with the live video and surveillance power of eyechange and the carpet search and tracking technology of soulsearch. Tom Hanks is the wise and resourceful CEO, and Emma Watson's transformation from a rookie employee to a powerful woman is a brilliant rivalry. But the other supporting characters, such as Karen Gillan and Ellar Coltrane, are less compelling and recognisable due to the disjointed plot.
The original novel, The Circle, is divided into three parts and is told in the third person, with the novel being well structured and the main threads clearly organised. The film adaptation still highlights the absurdity of the 'transparent life' shaped by the prevalence of social media, but many passages do not flow smoothly and feel abrupt. One of the reasons for this is the lack of specificity in the characterisation of the characters - Annie's moods are unpredictable, the founder of the company, Ty (John Boyega), is a completely flaky tool, and Mel's mind shifts too quickly - and the lack of characterisation of these important characters.
The second is that the plot and editing jump around too much, resulting in some of the strands being disjointed and uninspired, especially the ending, which hardly echoes the revelations in the previous section and seems to end without a hitch.
All in all, writer-director James Ponsoldt should have hired someone else to write the film. It's a shame that he found a novel subject but couldn't come up with a groundbreaking idea.
The company in this film is dedicated to using social media to create a safer and more rational international village by making the whole of the United States, and the world, socially connected. The company's first and most powerful invention is the "Real You" (originally called "Real Me"), which integrates a federated operating system with all online platforms. When you think about it, this is very advanced thinking and technology, allowing users to register a set of passwords with their real identities to get around the internet and to stop scumming or bullying by people with fake identities on the internet.
In addition, the Loop has developed the EyeChange, which uses satellites to transmit photographic images, the ChildTrack project, which implants chips into children's bones, and the Soulsearch, which searches for people, and even promotes the use of the Loop system for people to vote, persuading them to join the Loop in creating a beautiful utopia. (The Ring's businesses are more diverse, including a "love network" to match lovers, an Internet to promote merchandising, a "weapons detection" system to reduce gun crime, etc.)
Whether it is CEO Bailey, Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt) or Mel, who has been promoted from "small fish" to "great white shark", all of these people have developed a completely confusing and plausible rhetoric in order to increase the profitability of the Ring and consolidate the company's power as a media hegemon.
The concept of "Ring" is based on Bailey's phrase "Knowing is good, but knowing everything is better". The staff at Loop admire the CEO's wisdom and insight, and most of them have become fans of the cult of the devil, Annie and Mel being no exception.
It is true that the online media system introduced by Loop has brought unprecedented convenience to people's lives and the ability to search for criminals or terrorists to fight crime, but in its unrestrained overdevelopment, what was intended to be a convenient way for users to track, record and save their data could be extended to become a weapon for surveillance, bugging and intimidation. This is no longer the defence of intellectual or human rights, but another form of totalitarianism. The most frightening thing is that human nature will slowly change and become a bloodthirsty race.
Annie's workload soars and her moods begin to falter. Apart from canoeing and meeting her parents, Mel lives almost exclusively in a circle surrounded by the 'ring network', constantly trying to penetrate the top layers of the company.
The revelation of all the emails has put Bailey and Tom under investigation for market monopoly and privacy violations, but a look at the final scene of "Eye in the Sky" shows that the wheel of internet technology is not going to stop and there is no going back to "transparency in life".
The original liner notes John Steinbeck's quote from East of Eden: "The future has no boundaries, no borders, so that mankind has no room to store happiness. This quote is in fact the end of the play, and that is our future.