Genre: Social Media Thriller??
Premise: A young woman eagerly joins the fastest rising tech company in the world, losing herself in the company’s agenda to rewrite how we live our lives.
About: This project is rapidly approaching red-hot status. It stars Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and internet demigod, Patton Oswald. The script was written (and will be directed) by James Ponsoldt, bassed on the novel by Dave Eggers. Ponsoldt is best known for his realistic exploration of high school in The Spectacular Now. But with “Circle,” he’ll be entering a whole new stratosphere in terms of budget and pressure. This has some high-octane (and blazing hot) actors in the film, with Boyega and Watson being on everyone’s “must have” list. This script must be amazing, right! Dave Eggers is a well-known novelist who tends to divide critics with his books. His most famous works include A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and A Hologram for the King (which Tom Hanks will also star in).
Writer: James Ponsoldt (based on the novel by Dave Eggers)
Details: 141 pages – November 22, 2014 draft
If you’re like me, you’re asking, “141 pages?? Why so long, bro??” Well, the first 20 pages of The Circle are dedicated to touring The Circle campus. If you can’t cut a tour down to under 20 pages, chances are your script’s going to run long.
And that’s what worried me when I remembered Ponsoldt wrote/directed “The Spectacular Now.” Now I liked The Spectacular Now. I thought its realism and unique angle into the traditional high school movie helped it stand out.
But if there was a problem with the script, it was that it didn’t have a plot. It kind of drifted along without a narrative spine. That can be done in a character piece, but if you have a thriller – like The Circle – you’re going to need structure. There needs to be goals, stakes, and urgency. And those first 20 pages of The Circle didn’t display any of that. How bout the last 120 pages?
24 year-old Mae Holland is having a rough time of it. Her father recently got diagnosed with MS and she’s got a shitty job that doesn’t pay the hospital bills.
That changes when she gets a job at The Circle. The best way to imagine The Circle is a cross between Google AND Facebook. Which is a little confusing, since the two companies couldn’t be more different. But that’s something you’ll want to get used to with this script. It’s pretty damn confusing.
Anyway, so Mae starts working for a department called “Customer Experience,” and quickly realizes how obsessive The Circle is. Every few minutes, her bosses check in on her via text. “You okay?” “Anything we can do?” “Why did you only get a 97 approval on your last customer experience?”
The thing is, Mae’s a trooper. She never gets too upset and so takes the texts in stride. This will prove to be her undoing, when the company announces that they’re ushering in a new technology called “Transparent,” that forces its employees to wear a camera wherever they go so that their lives are broadcast to the world 24/7. And Mae will be one of the first users!
As a result, Mae becomes a celebrity, with millions of followers watching her every move. Mae is out front on every mandate The Circle lays down, including its desire to legally FORCE every single person in the United States to sign up for a Circle Account.
As Mae’s 24/7 broadcast begins to freak her friends out and shrink her social circle, Mae continues to push the message, making sure the world knows that The Circle is the future… to everything.
Let me start off by saying…
What the fuhhhhhhhhh????
This has to be one of the strangest scripts I’ve read all year. If the idea here is to go with a zany-Janey-tone, a la The Truman Show? Maybe this movie has a shot. But I don’t know, man. This fucking thing is all over the place.
In fact, if I were pitching it, I would call it a social media thriller that focuses on a Google-Facebook company in the vein of 1984, that infuses itself with a touch of Scientology, and a healthy homage to the Matthew McConaughey starrer, ED TV. Hell, it even adds a little bit of Real Genius, with the company founder sneaking around campus in disguise half the time.
It’s just sooooo fuckkkkkking weird, dude.
But seriously, I never once understood what this script was trying to say. It starts off as a typical thriller, where we walk into a company and everything seems too perfect.
We gradually learn the company is evil, starting with its plan to put lollipop-sized cameras everywhere so they can watch everything.
This shifts to The Circle wanting to control the Senate.
That shifts to them wanting to do a Scientology-esque “transparence” thing, where Mae wears a camera wherever she goes. Then Mae turns into Matthew McConaghey’s character in ED TV, becoming a reality superstar.
Finally The Circle wants to pass a law to force everyone to sign up for an account and extend that into a FORCED PRESIDENTIAL VOTE! And if that doesn’t tickle your tailfeather, one of the final scenes has Mae chasing her ex-boyfriend in a pick-up truck with a dozen drones, broadcasting the stalking maneuver live in front of an audience, with them laughing away like a pack of crazed hyenas.
Okay, so let’s say that Ponsoldt miraculously nails the tone here. I hope he does. Because maybe we get a David Lynch version of a thriller.
But even if that happens, there’s still a major problem. Mae Holland is the most boring protagonist I’ve read in 2015. Not only is she dumb, but she spends the majority of the movie nodding her head, doing what others tell her to do, and not making any critical decisions on her own.
She is the world’s most reactive protagonist.
And I am SHOCKED that Emma Watson, the face of feminism, is okay with this. She’s playing a character who does what every man in this movie tells her to do.
For those of you wanting to avoid writing boring characters, what do I mean by this? What makes a protagonist boring? Well, remember this. The most important thing you can do for a character is give them a goal. If they have a goal, they will be ACTIVE in pursuing that goal, which immediately makes them interesting as a character, since we’ll instinctively want to see if they succeed in achieving their goal. We get none of that with Mae. Mae shows up at work and does whatever anyone says she should do.
In addition to this, you want something going on inside of your character. This is what gives them that elusive quality of “depth” all these producer-types keep telling you you don’t have enough of. Whether it’s a flaw they’re trying to overcome or something from their past they can’t quite resolve, they need to be battling something.
Mae isn’t battling anything. Her father is battling MS. But that’s her father. Occasionally, she’ll get upset about it. But never does this challenge her in a compelling way. If Mae was a workaholic and it caused her to abandon her father and family in their biggest time of need, now you have something. But we don’t get anything like that here.
I recently watched a documentary called Maidentrip, about a 14 year-old girl, Laura, who sails around the world all by herself. Eventually, it’s revealed that Laura was devastated when her parents divorced, her mom moved away, married someone else, had a NEW daughter, and then barely spoke to Laura anymore. This sailing adventure was a way to run away from that problem. But Laura eventually realizes she can’t run away from this. She must face it.
That’s what I mean by INNER conflict – something/anything your character is battling inside that can add more than what we see on the surface. This tiny little documentary had that. This big studio flick, unfortunately, did not.
In closing, all I can say is I hope they tightened up the script. My instinct is to say that the source material is faulty. Eggers’s stuff has always been a little left-of-center and maybe not the best material to turn into a movie. But Ponsaldt doesn’t help by drawing the narrative out and, as a result, exaggerating the story’s lack of focus.
And focus is everything in screenwriting. A script needs to be tight. This was very much the opposite.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re trying to say a million things with your screenplay, you won’t say anything. That was the problem here. A lollipop-camera takeover of the world, broadcasting our lives 24/7, exploring the cult mentality of tech businesses. It was too much to wrangle in, which led to The Circle feeling scattered and confused. Pick one!
