
This is the flip side of high technologies – the one that the creators of “The Circle” warn us about. Whenever you read this article, you will easily remember another example of how someone became infamous on the Internet against their will. “This is not a dystopia, this is a film about today’s society,” insists Emma Watson . Indeed, it is not so difficult to find personal information about most of us: go to a page on VK or Instagram and collect. And the availability of information in real life does not always turn out to be good: thanks to it, bullying, threats and blackmail are possible on the Internet.ĭuring a roundtable to mark the release of The Circle, Patton Oswalt (playing Tom Stanton) said, “People are not getting famous anymore – social media is making them famous.” “Social media is an amplifier, a megaphone that can be used for evil or for good,” agreed Emma Watson. But technology will serve good or evil – it depends on the people in whose hands they are.Įamon Bailey treats May almost like a father, but this does not prevent him and Stanton from using her for corporate purposes. Even “transparency” (at first glance – a nightmarish violation of human rights!) Can save human life or help justice.
#The circle 2017 movie
And the point of the movie “The Circle” is not that high technology is an unambiguous evil. “The Internet will always be a reflection of the person,” says Tom Hanks. He explains to May that this technology will save thousands of children’s lives.īut the same technologies can break human life. With the help of the ubiquitous SeeChange cameras, the multimillion-dollar audience caught May’s parents in the bedroom – and the elderly couple will never recover from shame. SoulSearch allowed May to find Mercer in a matter of minutes – only for the young man to die defending his privacy.Ībove, we have already found out that “The Circle” is a metaphor for the Internet. At The Circle, he is part of a team developing a technology for implanting GPS trackers into bone tissue. A character named Francis, who is not in the film, lost two little sisters as a child – they were kidnapped, raped and killed.

There are more such examples in the book. If not for SoulSearch, the woman who killed three children would never have been found. If it weren’t for SeeChange cameras everywhere, May would have died the night she hijacked the kayak. The film contains at least two examples of how The Circle technologies are making the world a better place. But even in the world of “The Circle” the question of the legality of interference in someone else’s life has not been resolved unequivocally, and even more so in real life. For Ty and Mercer, on the other hand, giving up their privacy is impossible, the prospect scares them.

“Secrets are lies,” May says, and solemnly declares herself completely transparent. The Circle is a dream job for May, who so lacked self-realization. The Circle is a metaphor for the Internet, not a targeted strike at one or two IT companies.
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And people create the Internet: people write code and conduct networks, people make content and consume it, people like and leave comments. According to Tom Hanks, “The Circle” is everything that the Internet aspires to be. The Circle’s image is too versatile to be a distorting mirror for Google or Facebook. This is all the more strange because the book contains an accurate description of the The Circle logo: “a wicker lattice in a ball, with a small ‘c’ in the center.” Why did the filmmakers alter the logo – I do not know, but in the book “The Circle” is emphatically separated from real IT companies: “the giant that swallowed Facebook, Twitter, Google.” True, the logo of the fictional corporation suspiciously resembles the Uber logo, repainted and inverted. I don’t think The Circle is a satire on one of the real IT companies, say Google, Apple or Uber. In Eggers’ book, The Circle is called “the only company on which something really depends.” As blogger AtZ correctly noted, The Circle is not in Silicon Valley – it is Silicon Valley. The Circle is a universal image of a giant IT corporation. The paper “The Circle” will help us to understand the meaning of the “The Circle” cinematic in those places where the director and screenwriter obviously missed something.

I assume that most of my readers have not yet gotten to the novel, so sometimes I will refer to and quote it, but in a way that is understandable to those who have not read the book. But looking for meaning in the film “The Circle” is no less interesting from this.

Judging by the rating of the film on IMDb and Kinopoisk, the adaptation is not very successful – many details were lost when moving from book to script, and what was still included in the film turned out to be pretty much altered. The 2017 film “The Circle” is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Dave Eggers.
