Sork the Finch of the Eisenzuckerberg.

Rating: 8/10 (24 April 2011)

To paraphrase 99.9% of the reviews about this movie out there, "David Fincher helms Aaron Sorkin's script about Mark Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg, who's Jesse Eisenbergness infuses Sorkin's Zuckerberg with Fincher's unique style of Sorkinian Eisenberg Sorkin Fincher, of which Fincher Sorkin make Eisenzuck and Sorks to the Fincherian Jesse Mark Zucksenbergergerai. I loved/hated it, it was terrible/brilliant. Facebook is a terrible thing even though I use it." With reviews like that, I expected a movie with Personality, capital P. Actually, it was just a really good corporate thriller, which is nice because if we're going to mention Fincher, he's a director who can pull off anything technically, but obviously really prefers to make thrillers (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, at times, seemed almost sad that there wasn't a serial killer stalking the Katrina-looming streets). The movie firmly places Zuckerberg at well past the awkward computer geek to suffering some level of antisocial dysfunction, spins him into a dog-eat-dog world of ego and greed, and then throws him off as a tragic hero at the end before they can go as far as to implicate him as some sort of murderer. It's high-octane action whilst the characters mostly sit at computers and hearing boards. As goes the Sorkinish writing of Fincherian plotting of Eisenberg portrayal of something or the other namedrop Justin Timberlake.
Anyway, underlining most of how the movie works is the character Zuckerberg's habit of lashing out verbally like a cornered rat--even as the movie is opening. Those moments are the punctuation marks that structure the beats in this general shark frenzy, and would probably explain why most of this movie was shot as if Mark were in prison from the get-go. Thing is, if you watch contemporary biopics of people of the past, you tend to see such underlying emphasis (some call it exaggeration; others call it "drama") in aspects of real people's character, placing this movie quite firmly in the "inspired by" spectrum of the "based on a true story" paradigm. This is some story, indeed, but it was a mistake to make it so soon--firmly centering the audience's grasping of what's real and what's fantasy as a major drama where otherwise a rather fun genre film would suffice.
But the Internet is boggling Hollywood and so someone like Fincher has to step up to make something that isn't Eagle Eye. I still do not think Hollywood "gets" the Internet. Just look at the DVD cover, visually weighted almost completely by an entire pillar of critic blurbs. They seem to be expecting that us Internet kids with our multiple tabs opened in Firefox and columnar listings of interests are attracted by visual noise in graphic design, when such phenomena exist specifically because covers like that are tl;dr. But at least the movie itself doesn't fall into the same detachment from its audience as Sony's marketing department, firmly establishing its type-A personalities and biting ironies as existing in some horror land Harvard far beyond the well-lit streets of lolcats and message boards.
At least they didn't make a 4chan movie. That would be Miike's Ichi the Killer to this movie's Se7en.
--PolarisDiB