The Social Network

THE-SOCIAL-NETWORK

I was reminded right when the movie began that the screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin. In the first scene, Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend talked very quickly while also having multiple conversations with one another at the same time. I felt like I was watching the early years of The West Wing where I had to pay full attention to make sure I caught what was going on. I have been guilty, in this day and age of multiple ways of entertainment available to me, of not fully paying attention to a television show or movie at home since I’m reading something off my smart phone, but I had to put it all down and just pay attention while watching.

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Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. I have seen Eisenberg in quite a few indie movies over the years and it seemed he was moving closer and closer to Michael Cera 2.0 category by always playing the nice, awkward guy, especially in Adventureland and on a slighter scale, Zombieland. You would not confuse him with Michael Cera in this movie. He plays Mark Zuckerberg in full-on asshole mode. It is in this mode that after he gets dumped by his girlfriend, he gets drunk and creates a website that would eventually lead to the creation of Facebook. While being smart, he also suffers from feeling superior to almost everyone, which leads him to sometimes blog about things he shouldn’t or possibly steal other people’s ideas, even though he does make them better.

Most of the film consists of him getting sued by multiple people, including his former best friend, for either stealing the idea or cutting them out of what Facebook became. The movie cuts back and forth between two different mediations and what was happening at the time, but I never found it confusing. I wanted to see more thanks to director David Fincher for making mediations exciting.

Justin Timberlake shows up as the guy who created Napster and also likes to party a little too much. This is probably why he isn’t as rich as the Facebook guy. The score, which recently won a Golden Globe and is up for an Oscar was done by Trent Reznor, and actually was really well done. I normally don’t notice the score in the movie, but when I started to recognize some of the sounds as something Reznor-like, I noticed it and  felt it really fit into the movie. I can see why he won.

The entire movie isn’t so much a biopic about Mark Zuckerberg, but more about how there are these social networks out there to connect people, but they can still leave people as alone as they were before these networks existed. Just ask the lonely asshole who lost all his friends and still didn’t get back his girlfriend that he lost at the beginning of the movie. Moral of the story: quit being an asshole.

Grade: A

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