Cold And Soulless

Rating: 2/10 (30 January 2014)

It took about a minute for me to know I was not going to like this film. The male character, Mark (Jesse Eisenberg), a Harvard University computer geek, addresses a college-age girl sitting across from him in a pub. In an annoying voice and with all the warmth of a dead computer, he speed-talks his way through what is supposed to be a romantic date. As the plot moves along, Mark morphs into a kind of juvenile Gordon Gekko, obsessed with his work, greedy, self-satisfied, and unconcerned with the welfare of anyone but himself.
With the possible exception of Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), almost all other characters, including Mark, are cold as ice, selfish, and downright soulless. The Harvard University President is portrayed not only as obnoxious but also unethical. Basically, the script consists of a thousand villains and no one to applaud.
One really good line of dialogue stabs like a dagger. In a scene where Mark sits in a conference room staring at his laptop, as usual, a female legal assistant named Marilyn asks him: "What are you doing?" "Checking in to see how (Facebook) is going in Bosnia". To which Marilyn responds in a tone of sadness: "Bosnia, they don't have roads but they have Facebook".
The cast is too big. Acting is acceptable, given the heartless subject matter. Visuals overall are too dark. Sound quality in some scenes is terrible. Filler scenes could have been edited out.
Trying to be "hip", "The Social Network" cashes in on the "success" of a contemporary internet fad. Twenty years from now the film not only will be dated; it will play like some relic from antiquity. Either that or humanity will have been replaced by soulless robots exchanging notes with each other in code through some ghostly Orwellian hologram called Bot-book.