Over-hyped

Rating: 6/10 (9 October 2010)

he Social Network, about the intrigue surrounding the founding of the fantastically popular website Facebook (perhaps you've heard of it), is a fine film – but not a great one. That's a little disappointing, considering that David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac, Fight Club) is the director, but the movie isn't much more than a run-of-the-mill history movie about a subject matter – websites – that's not particularly compelling.
In 2003, Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) creates a quickie site called Facemash, which takes head shots of female coeds and puts them side by side, allowing male users to rate which one is more attractive. This crashes the Harvard network and brings him to the attention of one of the many posh elite clubs on campus, whose leaders (the Winklevoss twins) ask Mark to create a social networking site for them, but open only to Harvard students.
This in turn leads Mark to create Facebook itself, rather than the Harvard-oriented site. It also sets off a chain of events that would eventually make Mark a billionaire, albeit one sued by not only the twins but by his own best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the company's CFO.
The movie's how-it-all-came-together theme is interspersed with legal proceedings – both sets – that put everything into a sort of current context. What caused Eduardo and Mark to be at odds? Do the twins have a chance of defeating Mark? And how does Sean Parker of Napster (Justin Timberlake) fit into all of this?
More than 500 million people use Facebook presently. It's no longer a haven limited to college students. My mom's on it. If my grandparents were alive, they'd be on it as well. It's a hugely successful tool in so many ways – small businesses can use it to keep in touch with their customers, friends can find their friends anywhere in the world, people can catch up with old classmates, and so on. It's highly intuitive and very user friendly, and it's all free.
Making a movie about a website can't be easy. A website isn't three dimensional; it's not exhilarating to watch someone create one. The Social Network is simply not an exciting movie, although it tries really hard to be one. It attempts to show that the intrigue and back stabbing that occurred behind the scenes of its rapid rise into the zeitgeist is riveting, fascinating stuff. But when the movie was over, I didn't know much more about Mark Zuckerberg than I did going in to the theater, and what I learned about Facebook itself was just trivia.
On top of that, the legal stuff that's always in the background is just dull, no matter how many snide answers Zuckerberg gives to opposing counsel. We're not talking about the Scopes monkey trial here.
On the plus side, we do get a terrific performance from Eisenberg, who shows he's not just another schlubby always-a-victim actor; the role has some real heft to it, and he's amazingly up to the challenge, particularly with the rapid patter that always seems to be coming from Zuckerberg's mouth.
Other than that, though, this is almost a generic origin story about a subject that's really not interesting enough to warrant a full-length movie.