A masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (27 September 2014)

I watched this movie for the 7th time today because because Gone girl is coming out next week. And once again I was struck by just how good this movie is. Wonderful acting, excellent directing, beautiful cinematography, incredibly sharp editing and an amazing screenplay.
The movie opens with Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook talking to his girlfriend Erica in a bar. At the end of the conversation Erica breaks up with Mark. From this starts the story of the birth of Facebook. The story is told through flashbacks while Zuckerberg is going through two lawsuits: one from the Winkelvoss twins, from whom Zuckerberg might or might not have stolen Facebook and one from his former best friend and the co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin. In the flashbacks we follow birth and rise of Facebook.
The script of this movie is amazing. It's easily the best script in years. The dialog is smart and fast, just what you would expect from the film's writer Aaron Sorkin. Mark is an interesting and layered character but he's not a nice guy. The script is actually full of mean and annoying characters and that's quite shocking because everyone else would like to tell the heroic story of how young Zuckerberg created the great Facebook. But Sorkin doesn't. He's not interested in that. Perhaps none of these guys are good but they're interesting and through these characters Sorkin tells a much more important and interesting story. The movie has themes that don't have anything to do with Facebook so it doesn't matter if you don't care about Facebook. I actually personally hate Facebook and think this is a great movie. Because this movie is not about Facebook.
The movie is of course about human relationships. All that Mark wants in the end is to have friends. He is someone who has almost no friends (pretty much only one) and he is not a nice guy. He is rude to everybody and he doesn't even notice it. He wants to be someone like Sean Parker, someone who has friends and still can say exactly what he wants. But even Sean can't do that even though he looks like that is exactly what he does. And in this play of wanting to be powerful and get friends he actually loses the one person who he could actually call his friend. He has surrounded himself now with people who aren't his friends but just people who act like they like him. And he is not happy about that because he knows that these people aren't his friends. So he tries to connect Erica, the one person who has been his friend and who he cares about that might be able to forgive him and who is probably the most honest and caring person he knows.
The performances are wonderful. Andrew Garfield is really good as Eduardo but the movie's best performance is easily Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. He is excellent in every single scene he is in. The way he performs Sorkin's incredibly fast dialog is amazing and he also knows how to perform the quieter scenes.
But this movie wouldn't have been nearly as good as it is without David Fincher. He knows exactly what he wants from every scene and he goes and does it. Every scene is masterfully made and the feeling of the movie is really interesting.
Fincher also hired a lot of great artists to work on the technical aspects of the movie. The editing by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall is close to perfect, Jeff Cronenworth's cinematography is excellent and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score is extremely good.
I watched the movie for the first time when it came out in 2010 and I hated it. I thought that it was boring and Zuckerberg was annoying. And when Mark betrays Eduardo I became really angry at him because the only character I really cared about was Eduardo. Now I've grown up a bit and understand and appreciate the movie. The social network is a great movie and one of the best movies of the 2010s so far.