Dark, haunting, with more than a grain of truth.

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2011)

These days it seems harder and harder to go to the cinema and see a movie that isn't frankly rubbish. The Social Network is the best movie I've seen since the last century.
It portrays the beginnings of Facebook, probably the most famous and popular website ever, creating the youngest billionaire in history, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg who gives an incredible performance of a young man with vastly superior intelligence , desperate to make an impression and become "somebody". By pure chance he is asked to design a website for the college, which he agrees to, only at some point he decides that the site he's working on should belong to him, not them.
It's well known that a lot of this movie is fictitious but I believe the core emotions and events are very true to what actually happened. Zuckerberg fed off the thrill of playing people like pawns, gradually shedding his nerdy teenage persona and turning into a ruthless businessman.
The movie tells the story with atmosphere using dark, brooding, menacing music, it just all comes together and exudes some intangible quality that makes it seem hard to believe that this just happened a few years ago, you feel the gradualism of the build-up as Facebook gets bigger and bigger and how people quickly get left behind and how Zukerberg and Parker became perfect business partners to create something the world has never seen before.
It's very brave to make a movie about a true story so soon after it happened. If this movie was made 30 years after Facebook was invented it would have been very different. The residual emotion that was floating around after these events would have long since evaporated.
David Fincher did something bold and brave by making this movie. The fact that it upset Zuckerberg himself is an achievement in itself. He's been portrayed with more accuracy than he's willing to admit.