It made me mad at Oliver Stone

Rating: 10/10 (7 October 2010)

This movie made me angry at Oliver Stone. I enjoyed "Wall Street 2" and went for his excuse that he didn't hang the bad guys up by their thumbs because (paraphrase) "it's hard to made a compelling moving about CDO's, CDS's and synthetic derivatives." So he turned in a treacly movie with a love story, and on the level of treacly Hollywood movies, it's good.
But "The Social Network" has an even harder task: to make computer coding somehow interesting, and just to handicap it, it's a true story. So you can't just make up a lot of crap, you have to follow certain real life plot points and still produce a compelling story. (And boy, does it.) It's true that there are no likable characters here (and how hard must it be to write a screenplay where there's no good guy - bad guy dynamic to bounce around?) but then there didn't have to be in Oliver Stone's film either. Heck, he could have made everybody purely evil (as the first Wall Street managed) and taken them down even while producing a financially successful film, but he didn't.
Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin writes dialogue that reverberates like a Gatling gun, all the better to showcase the brilliant but socially clueless Zuckerberg as he hurtles past, not through human relationships. The film doesn't have a car chase, an over-choreographed bar fight, or much more than a few seconds of implied sex, yet it's one of the most compelling movies I've seen this year.
There are times when you just want to agree with the first female in the film who tells Zuckerberg "You are an asshole", and you wait for redemption or payback which never comes. Yet you can't take your eyes off it.
"Wall Street 2" was a candy confection next to "The Social Network." That's too bad, because Zuckerberg is only one jerk, and Wall Street has thousands of them. Would that they had gotten a more insistent whipping.