Twitter, Facebook, Insta-snap. There’s so much social media. What if we could just combine them all to serve us more conveniently? Tom Hanks and Emma Watson star in “The Circle,” about when technology takes things a little too far.
Interviewer: “How would you describe what The Circle is to, say, your grandmother?”
Emma Watson (as Mae Holland): “It’s the chaos of the web made elegant.”
Welcome to The Circle — the world’s most powerful technology company.
Tom Hanks: “If you took Amazon and Google and Apple and Facebook and Uber, and jammed it all into one entity, that’s what The Circle is.”
Tom Hanks plays Bailey, the kind of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg of The Circle. He’s a charismatic leader who is constantly pushing the boundaries of privacy and ethics.
Tom Hanks (as Eamon Bailey): “In The Circle there isn’t a problem that we cannot solve. We can cure any disease, and we can end hunger.”
The idea of The Circle sounds great, but when Emma Watson’s character, Mae, gets offered a job there, she realizes there are secrets hiding below the surface.
Emma Watson: “I think it’s about today’s society. This is not a sort of dystopian future that’s a long way off. This is a story that could be happening now.”
Unlike the internet we’re used to, The Circle has even more Big Brother elements to it.
Ellar Coltrane (as Mercer): “We used to go on adventures and have fun and see things, and now it’s all filtered through this.”
Emma Watson: “The expectations of employees at The Circle is that everything about their lives will be shared. The Circle has really found a way to commodify or commercialize every aspect of people’s personal lives.”
Now, we all have those friends who share a little too much on social media. In The Circle, there’s no such thing as oversharing.
Tom Hanks (as Eamon Bailey): “Without secrets, without the hoarding of knowledge and information, we can finally realize our potential.”
Tom Hanks: “The Circle is that great thing that the internet hopes to be and wants to be, and dear God, I hope it never becomes.”
Tom Hanks (as Eamon Bailey): “Because knowing is good, but knowing everything is better.”
“The Circle” opens in theaters on Friday, April 28. Tom Hanks said he based his character on the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, right down to the beard.
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