I’ve just been to the cinema to see The Circle, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. I admit it, I had a lot of expectations about this movie, having seen the trailer I expected an intriguing thriller that involved information technologies, social medias and ethics aiming at finding an answer to the privacy problem that comes with the new trend of sharing moments of our lives with our friends and, possibly, the world.
I have not read the book so I can say that I haven’t got the wide view which it can give, but doing some research I found out that the author of The Circle, Dave Eggers, wrote the script alongside with the director James Ponsoldt, so I can imagine that not many things were changed.
The movie focus on a tech company of Google or Facebook’s caliber who based it’s fortune upon a social network, TrueYou, which could let people basically do everything and in an extremely easy way, the connect everything and everyone principle is exaggerated to create a dystopia which could really be the starting point for a serious consideration about our on and off-line lives. Usually in every story after building a scenario which leads the protagonist(s) into thinking that a certain situation is good, something happens which turns the tables so that a new truth is revealed. At this point usually we understand what truly matters, the meaning and the purpose of the whole story.
I said could be the starting point before, because after building the scenario for like 3/4 of the movie, and having set a lot of matters which relate to some really critical issues of modern society, technology and human interactions, like, as I said before, privacy, big data management, obligations… After the so called turning point, [spoiler alert] nothing really happens, and the spectator is left with the thought that, as the poster says, knowing everything is better, which is not an answer and a development of those questions that were presented before.
The situation never shifted from the starting point, characters who seemed really important popped up just from time to time and no one did something to overturn the game. As I said at the beginning, I expected something which the movie never told me. It never got me thinking alongside with him.
Technology Lifestyle 