Running time: 120 min. Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language.
Directed by: David Fincher. Written by: Aaron Sorkin.
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara, Max Minghella, Joseph Mazzello
PCN Rating: 
There is a brilliant scene in The Social Network that documents the alleged moment of inspiration that lead to the creation of Facebook. Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg is in his dorm room, seething over a fresh break-up, blogging his frustrations, and then settles upon a cruel joke as his personal therapy. He hacks into the personal pages of Harvard female students, collects their profile pictures, and organizes them into a web page where they can be compared against one another, based on their ‘hotness’. It’s mean-spirited, it’s reactionary, and at the same time it belligerently tests the idea of how socially-connected people can become across the internet. It also crashes the server in its popularity. From there, it’s only a few hops and skips to a billion-dollar idea that exploits that premise.
As directed by Fincher, the scene becomes a patch-work collage about the way some great ideas spring out of moments of irrational emotion or calculated malice, and it also captures the way information spreads and gathers meaning in a social enclave like college. Underscored by an interesting musical arrangement by Trent Reznor, and edited together to provide as many potential viewpoints as possible, the sequence is the very best moment in the movie. Everything else just sort of orbits it, rehashing most of the ideas it captures, over and over for about two hours. In the end, Network is a good film that never quite delivers the insight of that initial proposition.
Fincher is an interesting choice for this material, and together with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, he draws the story together in such a way that makes it compelling. Trying to figure out a process for relating the rise of Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire, and his subsequent lawsuits at the hands of best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) would be difficult to begin with. Fincher makes this part look easy, and entertaining, as the film flies by in a flurry of carefully constructed scenes, snazzy cinematography and witty, pointed dialogue. What ultimately escapes him is the ability to make Zuckerberg’s saga emotionally satisfying. There have been great movies made about jerks, but unlike Charles Foster Kane, Mark isn’t a really interesting jerk. So, the movie struggles for a relevancy it never finds, and what could have been a great film is diluted by lack of a subtext.
The performances and the direction are most certainly not at fault. Jessie Eisenberg gives a prickly, closed-off turn as Zuckerberg, and he’s working with not very much, since the real Mark never gave interviews or insight for the film; the surface facts and the reports of the Winklevoss twins and Saverin are more or less, all there is to go on. So, Eisenberg creates a man pulled into himself, who may be brilliant but is also socially awkward, and his actions and behaviors an enigma to everyone else. Garfield, as Saverin, is the closest thing the film has to an emotional soul, and he humanizes the scenes with Mark, by extension adding poignancy to their failed friendship.
Armie Hammer, aided by subtle visual effects and a stand-in, is so convincing as the twins—including their differing temperaments and character—that the audience outside the theater were frantically trying to discover who this hot new acting duo really were. Justin Timberlake enters the film late as Sean Parker, the creator of Napster, and plays him as a charismatic, insidious cancer that has eaten through itself and wants to start in on Mark and Ed. He’s almost completely slimy, and that’s sort of refreshing, because so many of the other characters are indecipherable on a moral level.
As I mentioned before, the film has been wonderfully crafted, and Fincher is a gifted director who combines the best possible traits of old-school Hollywood with the newer, hungrier regime (of which he was a founding force). The early passages at Harvard so clearly evoke the experience of college that watching the posh frat parties, awkward dates at the local watering hole, and late-night dorm bitch sessions is more interesting than trying to track the creative genesis of the Facebook idea. The courtroom sequences are smartly integrated into the narrative, and sort of serve as chapter heads and ease the movement of the story from the college campus to a frantic bachelor pad in California where Zuckerberg, Parker and a small mob of groupies and programmers try to achieve greatness.
The score by Trent Reznor is one of the pictures’ strongest features and it’s both symphonic, strange and awkwardly appropriate. The buzz and hum that surrounds and accents scenes of people typing and clicking furiously on computers does a better job at suggesting the invisible connections of an integrated network than the script itself does. Underneath everything, Reznor’s haunting soundscape lurks. It rises to the occasion in unexpected ways, including an Olympic rowing competition where the Winklevosses compete against a trumped-up version of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’.
What The Social Network really lacks, underneath it’s well produced exterior, is an idea or thematic device that would link Zuckerberg’s story to the concept of social networking and technological obsession in a way that would give the film a deeper context. We have seen this sort of rise and fall of the genius many times before, but no film yet has ably captured the new, wild frontier of modern cyberspace. Sign me up when Fincher decides to make that movie. Until then, we have this one, which is a terrifically directed flick about a not so likable guy.
judging broads on their hotness is mean spirited? Well maybe at Harvard since they can’t really be hot hot like co-eds at Sand Dog State or Arizona State or UCLA. The Harvard chicks are probably bowzers.
good to see that the Ninja made a come back with the redesign.
Hey hows this twin work compare to that Edward Norton thing earlier this year? Did that movie rely heavily on crouch shots like this movie did?
Also serious I think I feel the way about fucking added in CGI cold breath that most people do about CGI blood. Its so fucking worthless and pointless. Fucking just show the character shivering rubbing their arms. I get it they are fucking cold. This movie went OVERkill with that fucking effect. The problem is that these animators don’t time is naturally so they always have air coming out of these peoples mouths with every word they say. It doesn’t happen that way. I don’t know whats so hard about getting it naturally or not at all?
You are right that the movie opens with a hook but never lives up to it and the emotional punch at the end isn’t worth shit because you don’t care.
I think the whole twin story should have been taken out entirely. BUT there goes all the humor of the movie. It should have been more about Zuck and Spiderman. Their raise and their split. As it stands now, I feel like I just saw a really good bio movie on TV.
And the camera work felt pretty basic to me. Same shit Fincher’s done time and time again. He’s camera work in Zodiac and Ben Button was much more interesting. Sort of a shame that people praise him for being restraint with it, his camera work is what makes a lot of his shit memorable. Actually I’d have to watch it again but I’d say Seven is his most straight forward work with the camera.
You give more credit to the music then I would. It’s nothing new from Trent. Same stuff he’s always done. I guess he did that version of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ (if you want a really cool version of that look up the Apocalyptica version of it!) but to me that sounded like something straight from tomanandy from ‘Rules Of Attraction’ a movie that I think gets the feel for New England rich people college a lot better then this movie did. This movie had a very false college feel to it. Seeing that I’ve partied at both an Art College in Connecticut and Harvard I’ve got some idea what I’m talking about and they are more like Rules of Attraction, in look as well.
Also that whole crew regatta scene was so worthless to the movie as a whole I didn’t get the point. What’s really odd to me is why Mark Zuckerburg would be ashamed at all by this movie. I get that he would probably be more worried and focused on the inaccuracy of the facts but this movie plays him up to the this underclass hero to the Winklevoss’ inability to achieve any greatness and not living up to their name. Sure Fincher is never going to come out and create some SLAPSTICK bad guy, but the Winklevoss twins were pretty close to cartoons in this thing.
Well-I’d give this flick a 3.5 out of 5 Fists-shading towards 4.0, but ehhh.
My problem isn’t with the production values or acting, but more towards the script.
To be clear, the script has tons of great dialogue a is hands and feet above most of the dreck that is passed off as scripts in Hollywood movies these days.
That said, it drags some in the middle. Also, it lacks any clear arc. Great beginning, and it peters off towards the end-all the while snidely setting you up for this revelation the whole time.
It lacks any villians, while at the same time being largely a work of fiction.
Yes, it does seem easily summed up as Revenge of the Nerds 5-with entitled Harvard Undergrads being set up as hapless villains who get outsmarted by the nerdy douchebag, but that story is over even before the third act commences.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t many scenes that are full of gravitas-it’s just that said scenes have an ephemeral quality that I’m forgetting even an hour after watching the movie.
Myself, I can retroactively see exactly how the movie could have won Oscars: by pointing out the true villain. Social Networking itself.
The movie would have been great if the third act started splicing in the negative effects of social networking. That would start with scenes of facebook bad episodes like the dude passed out on the toilet. The chicks with bras off getting expelled. The-you have all surely heard of many horror stories that only get progressively more gruesome as many, many lunkheads do continually dumber and dumber things.
The entire time, I was checking my watch and thinking about the PG-13 rating.
I honestly believe that Sorkin wanted to go there-and show an end where the Facebook monster becomes like Frankenstein, with that hapless cunt Zuckerberg as the Mad Professor.
I was hoping for a goddamn horror movie.
Instead, I got some dopey Public Service Announcement that half-assedly explains what facebook is to old people and how college students sometimes do stupid things.
Fuckin’ A. Animal House explains this much more clearly.
On the plus side, the movie does a spectacular job of illustrating the complete lack of some fundamental personality trait that is truly seen in most computer engineers.
Eisenberg/Sorkin/Fincher have made a masterpiece in the portrayal of a fictional Zuckerberg as a typical computer science major. They portray what has been my experience working for years with such people: They are 2/3rds there, but 1/3 of their personality or soul simply doesn’t exist.
Whether it’s because of a lack of a nurturing home environment, persecution for being intelligent in school, or complete immersion in computer systems that have only been available to the general Western population in the last 25 years-or all these things combined on an individual basis-I’ve never seen it portrayed so accurately.
Maybe that’s why Fincher pursued this script: He is particularly adept at making movies about serial killers.
He wanted to make some money by making a watered down flick about a personality type that’s only one shade removed from the same thing.
That said, you are personally invited to follow me at Twitter.
I’m @LordBronco.