of life, love, loss, friendship, betrayal, greed and power

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2010)

A nerdy Harvard student and his geeky mates play a misogynistic prank on their female peers, and end up creating a multi-billion dollar company known today as Facebook. From such everyday fare Fincher conjures up a tight, keenly observed movie encompassing Shakespearean levels of farce and tragedy.
Biopics are not history, and anyone wishing to know the true tale of friendships made and lost as vast fortunes arose from nothing is advised to go the the library. Sorkin's predictably verbose script from the kick-off unashamedly declares itself authentically Sorkin rather than authentically undergrad class of 2003. As a movie, Social Network details the egos and neuroses that unthread interpersonal relationships on the Harvard campus as young men find themselves ill-prepared to navigate the juggernaut they create.
Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as charmless and dislikeable, but utterly compelling. His triumph is that you come away from the film pitying a character worth 26 billion dollars. Andrew Garfield proves more grounded and yet gullible as Eduardo Saverin, the partner who took a huge settlement to walk away. Very quickly accelerating to post-success Facebook and courtroom drama, the film plays mostly in flashback and tests us to figure out at what point exactly Zuckerberg sold his soul to the devil, and just who the devil is - Sean Parker? Lawyers? The saps who spend their lives on Facebook making it as huge as it is? Fincher's trademark silver and dark blue palette is used to great effect on the rain-soaked campus, as Harvard's asinine, snobby campus culture serves to pervert the minds of young men towards pettiness, elitism, and a contempt for women. When twin brothers suing Zuckerberg use their family connections to meet the President, the rot is shown to emanate from the core as he brutishly fails to see the nature of the problem before him.
This is a highly enjoyable, timeless tale of greed, myopia and the corrupting influence of power, slickly executed by one of the most accomplished filmmakers around.