“The Circle”-Review:

Mae Holland (Emma Watson) lands her dream job at a massive tech company called The Circle. As she rises through the company’s ranks, Mae crosses paths with Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), The Circle’s founder. Being close to him has lead Mae to the middle of The Circle’s deepest secrets and their agenda. How she handles this information will affect the lives of her friends, family, and all the members of The Circle.

The bestseller written by Dave Eggers should’ve stayed on the printed page and not adapted into a film. It worked a whole lot better on the page, and something went wrong in adapting this novel into a script. You never really get to care much about any of these characters. Mae Holland is the main protagonist and you never really understand her motivations. She’s someone who got too much too fast, and lost herself in the process of becoming more popular. There was too much character building in the book, and nearly none here. I was stuck wondering why Mae was making the choices she was making, because we hardly knew her.

Tom Hanks was solid as Eamon Bailey the man in charge at The Circle. You believe him as a tech, social media genius. He came off as charismatic and a natural leader. Hanks isn’t in it nearly enough, but it’s powerful when he does. Watson, was good too. She conveys her emotion very well, you can tell a lot of this is too much to fast, and she’s just going with the flow. Watson did well portraying that, it’s just a matter of whether or not that character should have been in that situation. It was good to see Patton Oswalt. He plays Bailey’s right hand man and does a pretty good job in a limited role. John Boyega pops up for three or four scenes as Ty, if you weren’t aware of the book you’d believe this role was a throw away.

Some of this editing is very bizarre and hard to follow. At times it’s jarring. For a movie like this, you shouldn’t have had a problem cutting it together, that team struggled here.

For a book to movie adaptation, it’s the cliff notes version of a book full of flushed out characters, developed story points, and character choices. It’s not that the few changes bother me, they made a movie that should’ve been two and a half hours, just under two. This story wasn’t possible to tell in that amount of time.