Slightly overrated, but still worth watching

Rating: 6/10 (3 July 2013)

Social Network is a fictionalised account of 'Facebook's birth' and during this journey the viewer gets to see what happened before Facebook - Zuckerberg's (Jesse Eisenberg) early effort at Social Networking which initially begins at his Harvard University. During Facebook - the legal battles that Zuckerberg faces between two brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Spence respectively) who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea and also the legal battle between Zuckerberg and best friend and CFO of Facebook Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) who felt that Zuckerberg cheated him out of his share of Facebook.
Social Network is a bit of a mixed bag and in my opinion the good slightly outweighs the bad. I will start off with the aspects of Social Network that I liked;
Firstly, the directing David Fincher's direction is really crisp. Throughout the film, it cuts between the legal battles and the evolution of Facebook and everything just flowed naturally. Another aspect that I liked was the script, although I'm unsure how much of what I saw was true, I did like the content of the film and found the way that Facebook evolved and the various legal disputes to be fairly interesting. Whatever tweaks have been made to the story have been done to good effect.
One of the main problems with Social Network was the characters themselves. The vast majority of the characters either weren't interesting or very well developed and I just couldn't make any sort of emotional connection to nearly all the characters. The only character who I felt any sort of sympathy for was Saverin. It has to be said that Andrew Garfield's acting was also much better than the rest of the principle cast. Justin Timberlake shows up about half way through the film as Sean Parker (an arrogant know it all) who becomes an investor in Facebook following the downfall of his previous company Napster which was a music downloading site.
To sum up, Social Network is a watchable film which is well directed and it also has a decent script, but for me it was let down by poor characterisation and because the characters lacked depth and I just didn't care for them. It is a film that I would say was merely 'good' rather than 'great'