The Social Network: Movie Review

The Social Network: Movie Review

The Social Network
Rating: 9/10
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara
Director: David Fincher
Facebook - Like or dislike, it's part of our daily lives now on a massive scale.
So perhaps it was inevitable that Hollywood would turn its attention to this phenom, and now here it is.
The great Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as we dive back to the heady days of the 2003 Harvard scene - as the film opens the obnoxious and arrogant Zuckerberg is being dumped by his girlfriend (Rooney Mara - soon to be seen in the Millennium Trilogy remakes as Lisbeth Salander).
Angered by his treatment, he heads back to his college room and starts to use the internet to vent his spleen, before deciding on hacking into the Harvard mainframe so that he can set up a Harvard college-based 'Hot or Not' website to get back at the campus women.
Pretty soon, his site goes viral and causes the campus to crash - and this brings him to the attention of not only security and the admin board on campus, but also to the attention of a pair of Harvard twins, the Winkelvosses, who are working on a site idea called The Harvard Connection.
While Zuckerberg initially seems keen on the idea, he soon apparently uses the basis of that proposal to found a site, thefacebook, with business partner and long-term friend Eduardo Saverin (Spiderman's new webslinger Andrew Garfield).
However, when thefacebook gets bigger and the co-founder of Napster Sean Parker (a great turn by Justin Timberlake) gets on board to try and help spread the word, it all begins to go wrong for Zuckerberg, as blind ambition clouds his judgement.
The Social Network is written by the West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin - and you know it from the moment the film opens.
With a sensationally wordy and intelligent opening, every character flaw of Zuckerberg is laid bare - his snobbishness, his petulance, his arrogance (as his ex tells him, "People will hate you but it's not because you're a nerd, it's because you're an asshole") are there for all to witness.
The whole film's framed around two legal cases - one brought by Saverin and the other brought by the Winklevoss Twins - and the narrative zips back and forth to both cases and the founding of Facebook.
Director David Fincher does a great job of pulling the various threads together and a blistering soundtrack from Trent Reznor keeps the whole thing pumping.

Sure, there are a couple of lulls in energy here and there (after some two hours you'd expect some kind of dip), but with a excellently written and tautly pulled together (and occasionally witty) script combined with an absolutely mesmerising turn from Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is simply unmissable and the film for the web generation.