Is it really a movie?

Rating: 5/10 (5 February 2011)

THe first thing I should do is declare an interest - or maybe it'd be more accurate to say a LACK of it. I didn't come to this film with a particularly open mind. I actively dislike Facebook and the whole "social networking" phenomenon, so if a drama about its origins was to keep me on board for the whole ride, it would have an uphill battle on its hands.
Sure enough, by about 20 minutes in, I was getting restless. Simon Amstell - sorry, Jesse Eisenberg - does a great job as Zuckerberg, but the script portrays him as such a thoroughly unlikeable, asocial being that I found it pretty hard to give a damn about what he was doing, and his fellow Harvard undergrads were portrayed as a pretty vacuous bunch of twerps too, which didn't help. Fortunately, the character of co-founder Eduardo Saverin provided somebody to care about. Then - before my hand had strayed too close to my coat - the plot began to thicken nicely, and thereafter the pacing kept us bowling along to the finish line.
Was it worth sticking with it to the end? On the whole, yes: it's a fairly satisfying drama. However, I'm not sure that it really qualifies as "a movie". A tale well told it may be, but to me it felt more like it belonged on the small screen - as a two-part TV drama, perhaps - not as something you'd willingly part with hard cash to go and see in a cinema. Oh, and one final thing: can somebody PLEASE tell David Fincher that incredibly dingy, yellow-lit interiors aren't atmospheric - they're just very difficult to see!