The opposite of a cryptocurrency future: The Circle movie review | Spoiler-free

The Circle's biggest flaw is it's view of the future where centralized systems reign supreme.

I watched The Circle because it sounded like a cool near-future science fiction flick, and it is, but it also feels like it could have been so much more.

The most disappointing part of the movie was that it seemed like it had so much potential at the beginning, which it then promptly failed to fulfill. 

A Google facsimilie

The main character, Mae (Emma Watson), gets a job in tech support at a Google-like company called The Circle, that has an over-the-top campus and an larger-than-life personality at the head of the company. 

The Circle is developing tiny, cheap, high-resolution cameras that they want everywhere, recording everything, storing and analyzing the data in their centralized computer system.

Mae is thrilled, only she discovers it's a lot more like a cult than maybe she was expecting. No introverts are allowed at The Circle: You're ranked on how many social events you attend.

No mention of decentralization

As a nerd with an interest in cryptocurrency, this was the first place the story lost me. Everyone seemed to agree this was the only way something of this scale could be accomplished. There was no discussion about decentralization at all. 

It's a fascinating area of discussion that could have added depth to the story. Even a brief mention of the alternative of decentralization would have made the centralized nature of the plan more sinister.

Deep topics given surface-level treatment

The main thrust of the movie was about privacy and data storage and ownership of data, yet there were hardly any discussions about the implications of those issues.

In terms of the topics the movie was tackling, it felt very surface-level. There was so much more potential. And perhaps the book does it more justice -- I haven't read the book, though I might just to give the story a chance to redeem itself.

Surprisingly, the book's author did write the screenplay for the movie, but I think something may have been lost in translation.

Disappointing performances

You would expect great things from actors like Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Bill Paxton, and Patton Oswalt, but it felt stilted an unrealistic a lot of the time. Though Bill Paxton's actually did an commendable job of portraying the challenges of living with MS.

The keynote speeches at The Circle gatherings were especially cringe-worthy (though some tech keynotes are pretty cringe-worthy themselves, so maybe that was on purpose?).

The characters also felt as shallow as the rest of the movie. Mae keeps getting singled out as special, but we don't really know why. Eamon Bailey (Hanks) seems to have no other motivations than to be the leader of The Circle. Ty (Boyega) hardly has any lines at all but somehow plays a central part in the plot.

Was there anything I liked about the movie?

The Circle faces the age-old problem of so many science fiction movies: How do you make working on a computer look interesting? They tackled this problem well, superimposing bright red stylized chat boxes around the characters to give a sense of what was happening on the screen. It looked great!

I did watch the movie all the way to the end, so it wasn't so horrible that I had to turn it off. If you view it from the lens of, "This is what could happen if cryptocurrency fails," it gains an extra edge that I doubt the filmmakers meant to be there, but I enjoyed that view.

What did you think?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.