Slick product of a cynical age

Rating: 3/10 (16 August 2013)

Hollywood seem to have forgotten that to make an emotional investment in a film (and this is a long one, about 2 hours) we have to care about the characters and their story. Script writer Aaron Sorkin slickly moves his puppets about and has them say archly cynical things in his usual way but by the end the audience feels nothing but indifference.
Really, Hollywood thinks we all want to see a bunch of privileged, entitled people screw around then screw each other and we're supposed to care? These shallow self-interested people may be typical of Hollywood (and obviously connect with the critics who were almost unanimous in their praise) but in the real world people are more concerned about paying their bills not worried whether "entitled person A from Harvard" sues "entitled person B from Harvard" for xx million dollars.
Huge efforts have been made to make "The Social Network" as slick and self-consciously 'cool' as possible, so those suckered in the hype can delight themselves as to how smart they are getting it. The dialogue is sharp if unnatural (typically Sorkin) and delivered in rapid-fire fashion, sometimes (as in the opening scene) hard to follow (but the fans of this won't admit that, because that wouldn't make them smart enough); it is set in a subterranean darkness, much favoured by modern films (does nobody like daylight anymore?); it has a 'clever' (but dramatically distracting framing device; and a soundtrack designed more to sell CDs as to work on screen from the awful opening plinky plonky piano tune (representing what exactly?) to the loud inappropriate underpinning of the various scenes of drug taking or programming (the music makes no distinction between these activities).
In the end, we feel this is a typical product of the post-modern age: slick, shallow, cynical, derivative, dark and disposable.