During a brief break in the online broadcast, Tom Hanks leaned toward Jack Dorsey. “So, has this been good for Twitter or bad?” he asked. Hanks was only semi-serious, but the Twitter CEO didn’t have an answer.

Which is fair. What do you say to an actor playing a less than ethical version of yourself in a film that asks whether social media is destroying our humanity? Hanks and Dorsey met this week for a made-for-the-internet chat that also included two other stars of The Circle, Emma Watson and Patton Oswalt, and the film’s director, James Ponsoldt. The unlikely arrangement suited this new film, which raises more questions about the giants of the internet than anyone has answers. “It was a weird Russian-nesting-doll irony of post-modernism,” Ponsoldt told me as we discussed the online broadcast just after it ended. “It was very strange thing—and very generous, by all parties involved.”

Based on the 2013 novel by Dave Eggers, who penned the screenplay alongside Ponsoldt, The Circle tells the story of a fictional internet company—part Google, part Facebook, part Twitter—that encourages citizens to broadcast their entire lives in real-time and even works to change the very nature of democracy. It began life as a piece of dystopian science fiction that showed where the world might be headed in the years to come. But now, as the movie hits screens this evening, it’s not about the future. It’s about so much of what has happened in the months since the film was in the can.

In the 1970s, while making Network, the landmark cinematic commentary on the role of media in modern society, director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky would joke that their film wasn’t satire but “sheer reportage.” The Circle isn’t the film that Network is. But it too feels like reportage. As Oswalt put it during the live Q&A with Dorsey, “There is stuff we predicted that we really wish we hadn’t predicted.” That includes the evolution of Twitter, a company that owns one of the original live video services, Periscope, played an enormous role in the recent presidential election, and continues to feed the aims of the current commander-in-chief.

That mirror The Circle holds up made the online Q&A broadcast from Twitter headquarters all the more strange. The only pairing that would’ve been stranger: Hanks chatting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has by now pushed live video to so many more people and may have played an even larger role in the election. Still, Dorsey gave the conversation its own edge, thanks to his beard. “I play the guy in the movie you know is a diabolical genius because he has a beard,” Hanks quipped, this time for the camera, as he turned toward Dorsey once again. “Do you find that to be the case, Jack?”

The room filled with laughter, but an uncomfortable laughter—an ideal encapsulation of this powerful, if flawed, film. In the past, Hollywood missed the mark on technology more than often than not. At WIRED, we love WarGames and Sneakers. But in many ways, even these classics portray technology in sometimes cartoonish ways (WOPR, anyone?). The Circle succeeds in part because it gets the technology right—all the way down to the look of the online GUIs. But more importantly, it gets the business of technology right. If you know your Silicon Valley geography, when the protagonist, Watson’s Mae Holland, first drives to that fictional company in the film, the trip feels like the commute to Facebook. Once she’s there, the campus feels like Google.

Beyond these details, the movie captures the idealism that drives these companies, as well as the ways this idealism can have unintended consequences. As Ponsoldt said during the Twitter Q&A, Mae Holland embodies this “disruptor” mentality. “We generally see that as a good thing,” he said. “But we have also seen, over the past year, how people can come in from a different industry and affect the world negatively and positively. It doesn’t always work out the way we think it is.”

As I chatted with Ponsoldt later, what struck me the most was how well he understood an even bigger issue. After all the event of the past year, the world may have a better understanding of where modern technology companies have gone wrong. What’s less clear is how to deal with those problems. “There is a public good that was part of the thought process that went into the creation of many of these companies,” Ponsoldt said. “But at a certain point, due to the nature of capitalism and of companies, they tend to just grow. Their job is not to self-regulate. Their job is to show successful returns, to show a profit.”

These days, pundits worry about the longterm threat of artificial intelligence—the idea that AI systems that will somehow spin out of our control. But the film so clearly shows that there’s a more pressing problem. As Hanks said during the Q&A, the issue is not that artificial intelligence is taking over, but that our own choices are threatening the future of our society.

That’s an amazing thing to emerge from the mouth of a movie star, and it reflects his newest film. The first, say, one hour and thirty-five minutes of The Circle are enormously powerful, in an intelligent, worry-inducing kind of way. The film’s last fifteen minutes, which feel rushed, don’t quite measure up. The ending is ambiguous, confusing, and strangely open-ended. But maybe that’s only appropriate. It feels the most like reality.



[WIRED]