Will you be my friend? The Social Network review

15 Oct 2010 Leave a comment

by Laura Stackhouse in Hot Reviews, Must Watch Tags: , , , ,

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Image by sitmonkeysupreme via Flickr

Today I went to see The Social Network, one of this week’s new releases. If you haven’t heard anything about this movie or seen the trailer at least, say, ten times, I’d be likely to believe you been sent off the earth in a rocket, with earplugs tightly squished in, and a blindfold across the eyes. Undoubtedly it is one of the biggest movies of 2010, one that certainly will be the talking point of a lot of awkward ‘I don’t know what to talk about so I’ll try movies’ conversation parties. After seeing it I am skeptical of exactly how close to the truth it really is. I believe that Mark Zuckerberg was (or is) probably a sociopathic genius. I believe he probably screwed over his contemporaries to get what he wanted. But I don’t believe much else. Only Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin are the ones who can attest to a lot of it. Plus the story leaves a lot unresolved; Who really betrayed who? Who was really jealous of who? And so on.

The first thing I was struck by, actually in the first scene, was the speed of the dialogue. It was like watching the West Wing on fast forward with the sound on loud (which isn’t that much of a surprise seeing as these were both written by Aaron Sorkin), and also I hear David Fincher was under contract to make the film around 2 hours long and therefore has confessed he made the actors run through pages of dialogue as quickly as possibly). The pace is constantly speedy; which is good for me, I hate when a film drags unnecessarily. I think Jesse Eisenberg played the character of Mark Zuckerberg with excellence, Andrew Garfield showed why he is one of our rising stars (go Team GB) and even Justin Timberlake gave a performance that didn’t make me hum Sexyback quietly to myself.

Overall I left the cinema with a sense of wonder (at the genius of the concept of Facebook, its meteoric rise to success, and the film’s portrayal of its beginnings) but also at the empty and sort of cruel irony. If what the film portrays is in any part true then the founder of Facebook, the social network of 500 million people and countless friends, is (or maybe was is a better word to use) a lonely person. A lonely person who is now the youngest billionaire in the world yes, but a lonely person none-the-less. This is certainly what David Fincher seems to be trying to get across in the movie and it’s executed smartly and beautifully within that 2 hour 19 minute time slot.

Thumbs up from me!

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