Anyone else see this film starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, with a fine farewell performance from Bill Paxton?
Watson stars as a young woman who is offered a job at an internet company called The Circle (it’s clearly an amalgam of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc). It’s run by Tom Hanks who, just like the execs at the aforesaid companies, wants to control all information, personal and public. Each new notion he comes up with (the Circle taking over voting registration from the government, tracking down any person on the planet within 20 minutes with Circle technology, etc) smacks more and more of totalitarianism until even Watson, who has rapidly risen to the highest levels, decides he has to be stopped. How or even if she manages to achieve that I won’t say but it all makes for an enjoyable movie.
The irony is that many will see this film with its depiction of robotic young people tied to their communication devices without seeing their own reflection. One reviewer writes of the eerie effect when the film had finished of all the cellphones in the cinema lighting up as people left and turned from the big screen to their small ones.
I thought it a good watch.