The Circle does not explore any of that. It comes across as a shitty episode of Black Mirror.
Yes, it does attempt to deliver a commentary. On what? I am not sure. What should have been a damning condemnation of the culture of Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry in general turns into a poorly plotted predictable piece of shit that is only interesting due to the casting of actors, and has the depressing distinction of being Bill Paxton's final role before he passed as a man slowly dying of Multiple Sclerosis whose plight might or might not be played for laughs I can't tell.
On that note, let's start this with a breakdown of the eight or so characters that actually have names or motivations, and maybe more than one or two dimensions:
Emma Watson is Mae, a naive white trash simpleton protagonist that basically goes whole hog into the creation of a surveillance state.
Her parents are played by Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly, who I finally realize I saw on a bunch of episodes of ER now that the full series is streaming on Hulu (seriously go watch ER instead of reading this or watching the movie). Mae's father is slowly withering away from Multiple Sclerosis although from Bill Paxton's performance I wasn't sure if he wasn't just a drunk, but in his defense there's nothing wrong going out as lit as you want when your body is killing itself from an incurable disease. He pees his pants at one point and I'm not sure what the emotions in the scene are supposed to be.
Karen Gillan is Annie, Mae's inexplicably Scottish childhood friend despite Emma Watson's character never having left Northern California, she works for the titular company The Circle and gets Mae a job, which is basically a stupid version of Facebook if it also was able to invent magical Star Trek technology.
Tom Hanks is evil(er) Steve Jobs and Patton Oswalt is evil Steve Wozniak respectively, the CEO and COO of The Circle which totally "doesn't" want to "control" the "earth".
Rounding out this murder's row of shitty characters is:
The incredibly frustrating Ty, played by John Boyega, that should have been written differently for the movie to have been somewhat interesting.
And an unconventional looking actor (read: pretty ugly but without charisma) that I learned was played by the Boy from Boyhood, in his unfortunate mainstream Hollywood debut, as Mae's technophobic childhood friend and possibly exboyfriend? It's hard to tell.
I cannot and will not give a complete synopsis of this piece of shit since I do not have the attention span, but basically Mae starts off the movie a a poor person. Working an unfulfilling job as a temp in a customer service position in a bunch of cubicles with the water company, calling elderly people and badgering them for transcribing the numbers on the check they mailed, Annie pulls some strings to help her move on up to become: a Customer Experience team member working with complaints by the lower level of The Circle (aka Stupid Facebook)'s vendors.
The headquarters of The Circle/Stupid Facebook are clearly modeled after Apple's The Mothership: a monolithic construct that offers its mindless drone employees every service amenity they desire; ranging from a gym, daycare, lap pool, social pool, organic farm, clinic, french bocci ball course, helipad, tetherball, trampoline, doga (dog yoga, for you squares) and every other trendy thing millennials could want as they mimic the 90's tech bubble before it identically bursts soon and we're left eating people, hopefully starting with the rich.
Mae immediately becomes a customer service drone worker obsessed with her feedback rating, since it's clearly implied it always needs to be 100, to the point her manager encourages followup messages to anyone that rates their experience below 100.
But THEN there's a mandatory meeting with Tom Hanks, in his limited screen time as basically every technology company asshole leader that is secretly(actually) a supervillain obsessed with world domination who introduces a magical fucking piece of technology that is a camera with seemingly infinite resolution and unlimited battery life the size of a pinball that can stick to any material. And now this "amazing" concept called SeeChange can impact every aspect of life but it's ok since we're claiming we can target "despots" and "hostile regimes" in addition to self-policing our fellow citizens.
Then Beck shows up in a private concert and I'm not sure if Beck knew what he was doing. He is a scientologist after all so his motivations are suspect.
See how we're starting to see this is Dumb Black Mirror?
Here we reach the worst part of the movie since it's also the part where there COULD have been the best chance for a multilayered plot happen, but that would have involved well-written characters.
Mae doesn't care for the huge dumb concert Tom Hanks arranges to pacify his idiot herd of employees, and she wanders off to the fringes and runs into John Boyega, this mysterious employee that is hanging around the fringes and he has a secret (THE SECRET IS HE IS THE CREATOR OF THE TECHNOLOGY THAT LED TO THE CIRCLE BEING SO UBIQUITOUS, SOMEHOW), and he is acting as a lowly employee that dislikes where the company is heading.
Now, in a GOOD movie, John Boyega would be a company plant, an insert that hangs around on the fringes to draw out loners and iconoclasts, and backstabs them when the individualist thinkers find out the heinous shit the company is doing (He isn't, he's integral to the finale and it's all about exposing the executives).
Instead he's 100% onboard with taking everything down, he just needs more people and luckily Mae is somehow the first person he will share it with even though she's already mostly indoctrinated, and also more shockingly: no one knows what this Ty person looks like.
In the 2010s.
After he singlehandedly created 'TrueYou'.
An identity protection software that somehow ties every aspect of your online life to your personal identity and credit card, and maybe social security number? Surprise they don't go into it that much even though it's kind of a big deal. Maybe The Circle already bought a bunch of senators more than those they buy over the course of this stupid movie. Sure no one knows what this man looks like. Fine.
Her dad has problems with his MS (now covered for better or worse under this companies health plan) and she decides to go kayaking. Not just kayaking, night kayaking. Breaking into her normal kayak rental place, and taking a kayak out to the San Francisco bay like she has multiple times during the say before, but now this time she gets hit by the waves generated by a cargo ship.
Mae somehow is about to drown, despite being able to grab onto her kayak and if alone would eventually paddle into shore, a fascist helicopter shows up and surprise surprise The Circle cameras on a fucking buoy saw her paddling the school canoe and they called emergency services on her.
Instead of getting fired Mae gets promoted by Tom Hanks and she starts being the first person to catalogue every waking and even sleeping moment of her daily life, except 3 minutes for bathroom time, to show how awesome it is for a menial worker to be connected to the internet streaming her life at all times wearing a star trek high definition camera, with the ability for the internet to comment.
Almost immediately she accidentally spies on her parents fucking, since a deal was for The Circle insurance they have to have cameras put in their house, her mom using a Swedish-made penis enlarger to get her dad hard enough for sex due to his MS. It's still streamed on the internet. Ironically the one positive I have for this movie is a nice moment where adults managing to live with a terminal disease still find intimate sexual happiness exists, but for the movie it's clearly for laughs, although at least her parents cut her out of their lives later since they desire PRIVACY.
Even so, Mae still goes all in on being a company shill. Annie has a nervous breakdown since she's jealous of Mae being the surveillance star of the company and is kind of a huge bitch since she's really just jealous of her friend's success that she herself brought into fold, Annie was always high strung but all it took was a small push apparently (maybe her job avoiding government regulations also had a toll, we'll never know since this screenplay is complete trash).
All that leads to two things. Automatic and compulsory voting by making everyone having a The Circle(Stupid Facebook) profile, which is alarming since compulsory voting not controlled by private companies already exists in more developed countries like New Zealand, and the nightmare that is SoulSearch. SoulSearch (SS btw) is The Circle(Stupid Facebook)'s version of that AWFUL CBS Jeremy Piven show about "real-time crowd-sourced crime-fighting". Mae debuts this universal surveillance beyond-1984 software by having users, who are apparently always looking at their phones, catch a fugitive that killed her kids and skipped probation after prison.
SoulSearch uses input from all The Circle users to identify anyone, it takes like 15 minutes and the fugitive is immediately arrested (in the UK) and the crowd wants another so they demand to search for Mae's friend, the ugly friendzone one Mercer, that she accidentally got labeled a 'deer killer' when in an effort to be social with her stupid company Mae shared a picture of a kitschy antler chandelier in her parents house her friend made.
Things only go more downhill.
For starters: I am a conservationist and animal rights activist but collecting antlers/shooting deer for their antlers and meat is completely acceptable. Deer populations are far beyond sustainable levels because we have exterminated the natural predators, I don't know the overlap of conservationists with hunters but with venison it doesn't really matter that much.
Instead a bunch of dipshit vigilantes with smartphones immediately find his truck and cabin as he tries to live off the grid, then he runs out of the cabin and drives off, all on livestream, until a drone flies at his truck and he swerves off the bridge he's conveniently on, and plummets to his doom and you don't even get to see the truck drive off the bridge.
Mae shuts herself out from the world (possibly for only 3 days judging from dialogue) and in that time Tom Hanks decides to implement an idea for The Circle car software that will prevent "disturbed males" from doing things like driving off bridges.
There are so many ways this dumb shit could have ended, instead John Boyega runs up and gives Mae all of the bad emails between Tom Hanks and Patton, and she puts it on the internet which somehow solves things.
Not the real problem of that exact same corporation having a sitting senator removed from power and replaced by their puppet.
Not the idea of them having surveillance cameras literally everywhere in the world and considering privacy a lie.
Not the concept of people needing to consent to universal surveillance as contingent on employment or healthcare.
The guys that made this tried something and not only failed at it, but now the tech dipshits can use this as defensive ammunition.
Stupid Black Mirror, if you have friends that liked this I suggest exposing them to more influential, upsetting things that cause real cognitive thought. Like Black Mirror. Show it to your parents if they don't like it you should probably kill them.
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