10 Recent Movies That Tried Way Too Hard To Be Clever

Social Media has been a huge jumping point for movie plots for the last ten years. The concerns over Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been presented in unique and clever such as Ingrid Goes West, Searching and specific episodes of Black Mirror.

For a film to centre around the makers of one of these apps (in the case of The Circle, a fictional one), opportunity was rife for either parody or speculative questions. There are legitimate fears surrounding the ethics, freedom and the information tech companies have access to, and a thriller that shows employees abusing or twisting that power would have made for a more interesting movie.

Instead, The Circle thinks of itself as a few IQ points above all of that and ponders the idea of a Big Brother system in which participants freely share their lives for all to see non-stop. It's an unoriginal and uninspired idea; one that is exacerbated out-dated worries and fictionalized advances.

The Circle is a film that desperately wants to be part of the conversation about whether or not Social Media is going too far, and for most of the part it can't keep up with the debate.