![]() ![]() In doing so, she pulls a Julian Assange, but the movie leaves it ambiguous whether she is more akin to the Nobel-peace-prize-nominated WikiLeaks circa 2010 or the presidential-campaign-meddling WikiLeaks of 2016. In the climax, Mae turns the Circle's facade of transparency against its leaders. Sometimes the movie uses ambiguity to keep the audience asking questions. ![]() Bailey's proclamations about the Circle curing all disease and unlocking human potential could have been cribbed from the News Feed posts of Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg. He also has the onstage persona of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (down to employees taking snapshots with aluminum-colored tablets adorned by glowing white logos). ![]() "I played you! I'm not in as good of shape, I didn't exercise or eat as well, but I played you," he said.īut Bailey isn't channeling a single tech figure. Hanks' Eamon Bailey, for example, is the company's "public-facing visionary." Earlier this week, Hanks joked with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about playing a diabolical tech genius with a beard. Real-life tech references in the movie aren't meant as veiled accusations. Just this month, he said, live broadcasts of homicides on Facebook felt eerily true to the world of the movie, in which a character's death is streamed live. "It's present-day science fiction," Anthony Bregman, one of the producers of "The Circle," said in an interview on the red carpet for the film's premiere Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. He and his crew visited tech campuses and consulted experts to capture the industry's culture. She's the first person to "go transparent," sharing and broadcasting every facet of her life, save for three-minute breaks to the toilet.ĭave Eggers, the author of the 2013 novel on which the movie is based, has trumpeted how little he researched Silicon Valley, but director James Ponsoldt took the opposite approach. In "The Circle," "Harry Potter" vet Emma Watson plays Mae, a young woman rescued from the drudgery of temp jobs when she's hired at the Circle, the world's most progressive tech company.Īfter one of the Circle's products saves her life, the company's leader, played by Tom Hanks, recruits Mae for an experimental project. The upside? Tech geeks can still relish playing "Where's Waldo?" for real-life tech references. But to the tech savvy, many of the movie's dark prognostications feel pretty familiar. For mainstream viewers, "The Circle" likely provides an entertaining critique of where tech could take us. The objective of a tech thriller shouldn't be an award for peering most presciently into our digital downfall. As the megacorp embarks on moonshots to promote democracy, protect human rights and provide digital convenience on steroids, a few characters suspect it's covering up sinister motives, like crushing adversaries or accumulating wealth.ĭon't fault the filmmakers if that revelation feels tame. The movie, which opened Friday in the US, imagines a world where the mightiest tech company cajoles us to willingly abandon privacy. As "The Circle" envisions it, technology's dystopian near-future is already here. ![]()
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