K-SCORE: 61
Writer/Directors: Aaron Hann, Mario Miscione
Starring: 49 expendable B-movie actors and a fetus
Spoiler Level: Minor
This could be confusing. I watched the film Circle, labeled on Netflix accidentally as The Circle, which is not to be confused with The Circle, the novel by Dave Eggers that I have read, and certainly not to be confused with The Circle the film starring Emma Watson, which I haven’t seen. If you do get lost, rest on the societal laurels that art named for and depicting circles has a higher than average success rate. Not as high as cubes, but pretty high. Circle is a film in the genre of Cube, sci-fi like Cube, but held back by its two-dimensionality, but metaphorically and literally. If you get confused between the difference of Circle where people stand in a circle and die at an alarming rate and Cube where people crawl around a series of cubes and die at an alarming rate, just remember that Cube is the one with The Wren, and Circle is the one with an amputee who STARTS as an amputee. If you haven’t seen either, watch Cube. If you hate racists and yourself, watch Circle. If you hate society watch The Circle. If you love faux math, watch Cube Zero. If you love science watch Primer. And if you don’t have a sense of humor, don’t watch movies.
“so diverse that it’s like a college humanities professor’s wet dream”
In Circle people wake up standing in a circle and start dying every couple minutes. There ages, sexes, races, and sexual orientations are so diverse that it’s like a college humanities professor’s wet dream. Apparently aliens conquered diversity through kidnapping and murder. They quickly discern the rules of a game the aliens are making them play whereby they can vote for each other to be the next in line to get killed. The person with the most votes gets zapped and dragged off into the darkness. They stand the entire film arguing about nonsense as their numbers dwindle. Despite a plethora of extremely unlikable characters, and more than a few “huh?” moments where the people don’t behave logically or realistically, it is a pretty good movie. The advantage it has over most movies: someone dies every minute. I can’t stress this enough. You can make any film interesting by killing a character every sixty seconds. All these people do is stand in a circle having cringe-inducing debates about social justice politics, the value of life, and pathetic guesses as to the purpose of their unfortunate circumstances. The set is pathetic, a really dark room not conducive to anything other than giving the actors a decent view of one another that gets boring to look at after a few seconds. Top that with the suck sauce of a whining moron in a sweater vest, and at least five characters that only talk about the merit of one’s blackness or whiteness, and you should have something utterly unwatchable. The deaths aren’t even cool, just a vague lightning bolt to the chest, not blood, no squirming in agony, no one getting dismembered by laser grid or falling into a vat of hypodermic needles, but you can’t look away. Every minute you ask yourself: who’s going to get it next? And who would I have voted for? And what would I be doing? And that’s great.
“ a big whoopsy-daisy suicide pact”
Circle is good, but it could have been way better. For one, it needed a soft open where a whole collection of fifty people wake up, panic, try to run, cry, fall to the floor, try to push each other off their spots, never figure out the rules to the game, and all die within a couple minutes. It also could have used a post-credit scene of another group being convinced by a hippie to all vote the same way, all tie, see the orange lights, mistake them for a saving beams of healthfulness, and then die in a big whoopsy-daisy suicide pact. It definitely could have used anything close to creative cinematography or visual design. It’s an eyesore. And the narrative would have been much better without the alien invasion framework, which only begged more questions and made it less plausible that these people would spend their precious final minutes alive debating the merits of two gay women raising a kid. All that high-concept debate stuff was really shallow, and none of it escaped the realistic notion that anyone doing anything to draw attention to himself or herself was or should have been the next prime target. Also, you couldn’t see how people voted, which made the whole thing less of a mind game than it could have been. Imagine if they’d actually plotted it so every vote of every person was conceived and cast. But in terms of exploring the idea they had, the writer/directors did a splendid job. I loved the guy who just stood there the whole time.
One day, someone is going to make one of these sci-fi trap elaborate game of life or death films that really blows my mind, something legitimately good in every way, quality characters, smart narrative, cool twist, exciting, heart-throbbing, and beautiful - and that film will be called The Sphere, which is not to be confused with Sphere with Dustin Hoffman.