Emma Watson is quite the busy woman at the moment: Not only is she the titular beauty of the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, she also plays Mae in the adaptation of David Egger’s novel The Circle. The second trailer for the latter just dropped, giving us a better idea of the plot and the company the whole movie circles around.
It opens with one of the leaders of the Circle – played by the sympathetic, almost cool grandfather-y Tom Hanks – giving an inspirational speech about the endless possibilities that the tech company he owns and controls offers to perfect human beings. The trailer then goes back to showing Mae at her far more drab office job, making phone calls until she gets the life changing call that places her in the Circle. Although it’s all excitement, praise, and concerts at first, the pressure at work quickly increases, especially when her chronically ill father is placed on the Circle’s health plan. Additionally, tensions are rising between her and what seems like on of her love interests, Boyhood star Ellar Coltrane. As the movie soundtrack sweetly explains over and over that they’re watching us, the tone of the trailer changes, revealing that the Circle has cameras all over the world which stores, broadcasts, and analyses essentially all information, placing Mae is at the center of a struggle for the Circle’s future. But take a look at the trailer for yourself:
Those who know the novel might realize that two fairly central aspects seem to be missing, at least judging from the two trailers we’ve seen so far. One of them is Francis, Mae’s colleague at the Circle with whom she has brief and awkward sexual encounters with and who is contrasted by the mysterious, enticing Kalden (John Boyega). The second one is the concept of “going transparent” – the growing trend of wearing a small camera around one’s neck that allows everyone to see what you are seeing. While Francis exclusion is, quite frankly, not a big deal – seriously, no one needs a love triangle – not featuring the concept of transparency would probably seriously lessen the political punch of the novel.
Then again, trailers never reveal everything about a movie. They aren’t meant to, they’re meant to reveal just enough to intrigue the watchers and I am certainly intrigued. The book was one of my favorite books of 2014 and certainly one of the most politically relevant. Let’s hope that the movie lives up to that potential when it’s released in April this year.
