Thursday, 5 April 2018

Beyond the TARDIS The Circle film review by DJ Forrest



‘The Circle Must Be Broken’

Starring Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega and Karen Gillan.
Written by James Ponsoldt who also directed.

Imagine working as a telesales person, going nowhere. Imagine watching your Dad cope with the debilitating disease, MS and know that if he had the insurance, he could get specialist treatment to help him achieve the smallest of goals. Imagine a place, that held everything you would ever need on one campus. Where your social life, home life was dominated by a computer screen, and that everybody who worked there, would be on one massive friend group that you would need to add, to avoid being a cast out.

In a world dominated by social media, where Youtubers give you a blow by blow account of their day, where personal liberties are broken and where there is no such thing as personal space and anonymity, the Circle is a frightening look into a world where Everybody Knows Your Name. Knows your business and invades your private life.

We are all curious about our neighbour; the people we follow on social media and what they are doing in their daily lives. The Eye’s in the Sky are following your every move and even having sex is available for all to see through the use of the watch on your wrist, linked to the cameras in your home.

But that’s the price you pay for being ‘transparent’.

It may save your life if you fall out of your kayak, but its intrusiveness is draining on your time, your family and your friends.

When you become popular within the Circle and your friend who helped get you in, are pushed out of the limelight. When your family refuse to be filmed as they miss their privacy. When your best friend is killed because of the ‘hunt’ you agreed to in order to satisfy those you were converting to your idea. And to save face in front of the man who invented the intrusive little camera and who created The Circle who also put you on the spot.

When you introduce yourself to a mystery man interested in whatever is on his phone, even though it’s only sometime later when you realise who he really is, and he leads you into his world, explaining who he is, what he does, and what The Circle is really all about, do you discover some things about the Circle yourself that make you think.

But then you enter into the entirety of The Circle by making your world transparent – whereby you open yourself to the world, to comments about your physical being – where you’re judged by your actions, be it good or bad.

But, when you’re top of your game, and you turn the tables on the actual people running the show, in front of a live audience and right across the internet, globally – now that’s a game changer.

There’s no guns, no edge of the seat, jump scares. There’s no dramatic car chases – well maybe one, but not in the usual sense. Emma Watson plays Mae, the young telesales operative who through friend Karen Gillan, is given the opportunity of working in The Circle, so long as she passes the interview first.

The Circle was created by forward thinker Tom Hanks, who wanted to give his disabled son something to look at.

A few days ago, on the internet, a young mother was dying of cancer, and her wife asked random people to help complete a bucket list that covered a lot of places in a lot of different countries, and through the power of the internet, many hundreds of individuals added their photos and their stories, making the bucket list something memorable for the family.

That made me think of Hanks’ son in the film, because his father had asked people to add their stories, their photographs, their lives for his son to watch. I can’t remember what his son suffered from, but it was a debilitating disease, as far as I can recall.

The story itself reminded me of the countless nights of catching up with several Youtubers talking randomly about their day, from what they were doing to where they were going, and we’d sit through endless hours and for a while we’d be hooked on the lives of Zoella and Alfie and a pug named Alan!

Once you become transparent, you open your life up to the world. Just like Zoella, and Alfie, and Thatcher Joe, you invite complete strangers to see you from the moment you wake up, to when you clean your teeth before bed. The cameras would be on you throughout your life. They would be there when you visited the bathroom, took a walk in the park, paddled your kayak out in the open water. If you met with family or friends.
It would work against you. It had access to private data. It could track people anywhere, at any time.

It was Big Brother.

It was frightening to think that beyond the CIA and the FBI, that a social interactive media platform could have that much power to do what it wanted, and nobody could stop it. Except when you are able to turn the tables on those who created it.

Karen Gillan’s role was more of a supportive role but she played a fairly rounded character. She was integral to the story and the character played by Watson.

It was one of those films that I’d been toying with watching but wasn’t sure if it was going to be another ‘Perks of Being a Wallflower’ style film, but I’m glad I stuck with it.
The pace never let up once, there were no dips or pauses. Although I’d had the film on in the background while I worked on a 1000 piece cardboard procrastination, I soon put it aside to focus on the film.

It’s currently on Netflix, it’s well worth a watch, even if you do have it on in the background for the first half of the film.

    

No comments:

Post a Comment