story suffers from a reluctant conflict - **1/2

This movie is based on a 2013 novel of the same title. It is co-written by the author of the book, David Eggers along with the director James Ponsoldt.  Aimed to be a techno-thriller, the movie did not reach its projected income on opening week and ranked 5th at the box office running behind The Fast and the Furious and The Baby Boss.

Mae Holland (Emma Watson)  was hired by a powerful internet company called The Circle upon the recommendation of a college friend Annie Allerton (Karen Gillan) as part of customer relations.  Getting the attention of the co-founders of the company, Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) and Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt) she was asked to be part of a transparency experiment that later proved to be fatal to her and to her loved ones.

This movie boasts of a powerful cast,  a writer who also wrote the source material and the co-writer who also directed the movie.  It is about an issue that is so significant in today's era of the social media where privacy is cheap and almost non-existent.  But the movie fails to present an urgent conflict to make it interesting at best.  At the onset, when Mae got into the Circle, we as viewers were presented with what is obviously wrong with the company but it seems like the people in the story do not seem to recognize this.  And I feel I was pushed back just to allow the story to unravel and when it did I wondered where all the problem is coming from and I realized it should have come from the co-founders of the company but the actors who played these characters seem to be reluctant to be villainous thus making the story almost incomplete. I was a little disappointed watching this.  This is not Tom Hanks' best movie for sure.