This movie tries for too much. The idea of trying to analyze where high-tech may be taking us is a worthy subject, but the speculations provided did not engage me on a personal level, not did they provide any new insights
Apple, Google, and Facebook are folded into one entity here: The Circle. The building that houses The Circle is a takeoff on Apple's home base and the campus life there is an amalgam of stereotypical scenes from a Google-like campus. Tom Hanks plays the president of The Circle as a conflation of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.
The revolutionary product being developed by the The Circle is called SeeChange; it is a wide screen camera the size of an eyeball that can be trivially mounted anywhere and can broadcast its images to the web. The cultural effect of this product is to have tentacles reaching into all aspects of everyone's life.
The pros and cons of a device such as SeeChange are discussed. The power this device vests in The Circle is frightening: it gives it the power to manipulate opinion by having voluminous data on any one person and then being able to aggregate those data. This would effectively give The Circle the results of instant polling with the ability to push out information to support or confront current trends. Maybe just an exaggeration of what already exists, yes?.
Rather than speculation about an Orwellian future, I think it would have been more engaging to comment on where we are, even though where we are today may look simple minded in a year's time. Where I think the movie is on track is in trying to address the conflict between the power that corporations have and the erosion of privacy, but that's really not a novel idea at this time is it?
A death by harassment is offered as a tragic result of The Circle's new product, so the moral seems to be that the dangers of where we are headed outweigh the benefits. I personally became aware of an unintended invasion of my privacy some years ago when I was having what I thought was a private conversation with a relative who in short order posted a summary of our conversation to his Facebook friends. I am not even on Facebook and I started getting e-mails about how people were offended by things I had said. This illustrated to me the power of social media to cause me to censor my speech even in a private conversation. No matter how you try to protect your privacy, technology reaches deeply into almost every aspect of your life. Think what would happen if the Internet were permanently disabled.
Emma Watson plays Mae, an ordinary woman who gets sucked into the vortex of The Circle's power structure. I did not find Mae to be an interesting or engaging person. Her boyfriend Mercer had some appeal, but Emma dumped him early on. For this story to work we need to identify with Mae and her life. The reason "1984" was effective was because the two main characters are presented in a way to make you identify with their struggle at a gut level. In this movie I was not made to care much about Mae--her struggle was an abstraction.
I give this movie marks for taking on an important subject but have to rate it poorly on providing much depth.
Apple, Google, and Facebook are folded into one entity here: The Circle. The building that houses The Circle is a takeoff on Apple's home base and the campus life there is an amalgam of stereotypical scenes from a Google-like campus. Tom Hanks plays the president of The Circle as a conflation of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.
The revolutionary product being developed by the The Circle is called SeeChange; it is a wide screen camera the size of an eyeball that can be trivially mounted anywhere and can broadcast its images to the web. The cultural effect of this product is to have tentacles reaching into all aspects of everyone's life.
The pros and cons of a device such as SeeChange are discussed. The power this device vests in The Circle is frightening: it gives it the power to manipulate opinion by having voluminous data on any one person and then being able to aggregate those data. This would effectively give The Circle the results of instant polling with the ability to push out information to support or confront current trends. Maybe just an exaggeration of what already exists, yes?.
Rather than speculation about an Orwellian future, I think it would have been more engaging to comment on where we are, even though where we are today may look simple minded in a year's time. Where I think the movie is on track is in trying to address the conflict between the power that corporations have and the erosion of privacy, but that's really not a novel idea at this time is it?
A death by harassment is offered as a tragic result of The Circle's new product, so the moral seems to be that the dangers of where we are headed outweigh the benefits. I personally became aware of an unintended invasion of my privacy some years ago when I was having what I thought was a private conversation with a relative who in short order posted a summary of our conversation to his Facebook friends. I am not even on Facebook and I started getting e-mails about how people were offended by things I had said. This illustrated to me the power of social media to cause me to censor my speech even in a private conversation. No matter how you try to protect your privacy, technology reaches deeply into almost every aspect of your life. Think what would happen if the Internet were permanently disabled.
Emma Watson plays Mae, an ordinary woman who gets sucked into the vortex of The Circle's power structure. I did not find Mae to be an interesting or engaging person. Her boyfriend Mercer had some appeal, but Emma dumped him early on. For this story to work we need to identify with Mae and her life. The reason "1984" was effective was because the two main characters are presented in a way to make you identify with their struggle at a gut level. In this movie I was not made to care much about Mae--her struggle was an abstraction.
I give this movie marks for taking on an important subject but have to rate it poorly on providing much depth.