With two hit trilogies behind him (Ocean’s and Magic Mike), prolific director Steven Soderbergh can get any project greenlit. Fans already know that the legendary indie/big studio darling often does whatever he wants artistically, with Full Circle being his tenth directorial work since 2017. Each had signature quirks, but Full Circle is an unquestionably ambitious undertaking for Soderbergh. Read on to see if this series is worth the watch.
What is Full Circle?
Only occasionally a screenwriter himself, Soderbergh frequently works with returning collaborators like Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, The Laundromat) and Lem Dobbs (Kafka, Haywire). For Full Circle, he worked once more with his most recent creative partner, Ed Solomon, best known for writing Men in Black. Soderbergh and Solomon worked well together on the interactive mobile app/series Mosaic (which certainly beats this new series in ambition) and the neo-noir film No Sudden Move. Though Full Circle is only a straightforward watching experience compared to their previous miniseries attempt, it equals their other works in complexity, character drama, and crime thrills.
Full Circle follows four to six interweaving storylines, all somewhat united by a single classic theme: in movies and television, your actions always have consequences. When the Guyanese-American crime lord Savitri Mahabir (CCH Pounder) hatches a scheme to erase the curse put on her family decades ago, it unwittingly draws in the lives of a rule-breaking postal inspector (Zazie Beetz), a wealthy family (which includes Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid), and two young immigrants (Gerald Jones and Sheyi Cole) among many others. Through bad decisions, miscommunications, and sheer coincidence, all six episodes of Full Circle take the viewer on a whirlwind of unpredictable twists and dramatically tethered fates.
Critics and Audiences Weigh in on Full Circle
Any review will tell you the same: not every casual viewer will be on board with the dense plotting of Full Circle. Even with a thrilling plot that plays out tensely in the first two episodes, the continued stretching of each new layer of mystery will surely test anyone’s patience. This weakness of Full Circle also makes it stand out in an overpopulated genre; for example, viewers will find that the fanciful curse elements feeding into the reality of each character’s crimes come across as well-written if they are paying attention to how it ties together. Not every plotline has a perfectly satisfying conclusion, but each inarguably wraps up to a point.
Soderbergh and Solomon’s Series Success
Soderbergh has chosen his scripts and partners wisely throughout his career, and his most recent burst of staying busy is no exception. High Flying Bird, No Sudden Move, and Kimi all had dynamite screenplays with well-matched direction to boot, and Logan Lucky and Unsane proved that he could bring out the uniqueness in well-tread territory. Full Circle is another good, but not mind-blowing, product of Soderbergh’s singular focus – while a tightly written film epic might have served this idea better, every bit of Soderbergh and Solomon’s intended effort for the miniseries shows up on the screen here, resulting in a success that only the most inattentive audience should actively avoid.
Full Circle is streaming now on Max.
