★★★★☆

Great acting and amazing plot is not what The Circle is about. I say that and I still give it 4 out of 5 stars. This movie is about the evils of Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (APPL), Amazon (AMZN), Facebook (FB) and every other Wall Street tech darling with a massive corporate campus, employee dorms, on campus night clubs and every other kind of on campus activity to encourage young workers to spend all of their time at work, even weekends. Every person in the world should see this movie more than once. You will never log onto social media again.

What is shocking is that this movie got made. That any Hollywood actor or studio would get involved pointing out the Hitler Youth type indoctrination young people go through to work in such firms. While Hitler Youth groups indoctrination was focused on racism the indoctrination these kids go through justifies and rewards them for coming up with shiny new ways to invade our privacy. At one point in the movie one of the main background characters even shows Emma Watson an abandoned subway project which The Circle was taking over not to complete, but to store the ever increasing amount of personal data they were collecting on each and every person in the world.

If you pay attention you will just about fall out of your chair when Emma’s character completely drinks the Kool-Aid and proposes The Circle become not just the voter registration service for every country in the world, but the place where you actually voted and paid taxes and had every other interaction with your government. In short, becoming a defacto government themselves where only those socially connected via The Circle would have a voice in the laws which were made.

The word “transparency” is thrown around like the cure for all of the world’s ills. Where each and every thought is recorded and mined by The Circle so that the Gang of 40 could use it for their own purposes (pretty much what the Tech Darlings have been attempting for decades already.) This “transparency”  didn’t extend to the leaders of The Circle though.

At one point in this movie they pay a dark homage to the Princess Diana paparazzi death. The Circlers, like paparazzi, hounding a person who just wants to live off the grid making his chandeliers, is hounded by the iPhone carrying crowd until he has a high speed vehicle wreck causing his death. The mob mentality of The Circler crowd believes they are justified in this hounding, forcing this “transparency” just like the paparazzi felt justified Princess Diana to her death because someone would buy their photos and others would buy the papers which ran them.

While I shouldn’t be surprised Tom Hanks got involved with this movie, given he still uses a typewriter, I am shocked someone as young as Emma Watson could take such a powerful stand against social media and the tech darlings. She is in the age range where she should be constantly staring at her iDiot phone, missing all of life while falling into open holes.

fall into hole while texting video

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.