If you haven't seen "The Social Network" or read any of the plethora of articles written about it yet, be warned: there are some mild spoilers about what happens in it below.
In the fall of 2002, Mark Zuckerberg and I both moved to Massachusetts to attend college. Today, one of us has an English degree and one of us is the youngest billionaire on the planet, a phrase I've seen used to describe Zuckerberg in nearly every article about "The Social Network." On the plus side, no one will be making a movie of the stupid or heartless things I did when I was 19.
The movie has been getting all kinds of accolades. It has a 97% positive rating on rottentomatoes.com and I've seen a few "best picture" predictions tossed in there. Is it wrong to think it's not terribly original? The story of people getting thrown under the bus in business dealings is not exactly a new one. For someone as creative as Zuckerberg, it was awfully uncreative of him to screw over the people who helped him get his start. Maybe I'm the only one here, but I wasn't exactly shocked to know this about him. This is someone who has been regularly selling my privacy to the highest bidder. What's interesting about Mark Zuckerberg is not that he's ruthless. How often have you seen a movie or TV show where the successful businessman turned out to be a jerk? What's interesting about Mark Zuckerberg is that he changed the world.
The movie is certainly well-made and it has its clever touches. I particularly enjoyed hearing world famous recording artist Justin Timberlake talking about creating Napster. The Winklevoss twins, as played by Armie Hammer, were both magnetic and pathetic. But the movie depends too heavily on trying to tug our heartstrings about the way Eduardo Saverin got forced out of the company. It's upsetting and rotten that he helped get the company started and ended up shut out, but in the film's depiction of Zuckerberg, it's hard not to wonder why he would ever have gotten involved with him in the first place. Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg displays almost no traces of personality or affection for Saverin. Instead, Aaron Sorkin gives us some code to explain him. Girlfriend who dumps him just prior to the creation of Facebook and who we are expected to believe he is still pining for years later. Final clubs, to represent all the privilege that he can't reach, that he needs to invent Facebook to reach. He was attending Harvard University. He was brilliant. There was no question that he was going to be very successful. Why would a hacker who was about to change the way we all communicated be interested in something as old-world and staid as the final clubs? And why would he think inventing Facebook was going to impress a group like that? It's reductive and simplistic to say A + B = C for something like this. Unless A = money and B = more money.
What is the biggest problem with this movie? It's called "The Social Network" and doesn't have anything to do with social networking. Not that I needed to see a movie about people stalking their exes online, but I was able to glean from a few small (read: heavy-handed) hints dropped throughout the movie that I was supposed to be struck by the profundity of how the man who invented a website to bring us closer together has no friends. Instead, what I saw was a story about a guy who gets rich and ditches the people who got him there. Did Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher miss the last five years where Facebook changed all of our lives? Did they watch Citizen Kane too many times? Where is the recognition that there is something more interesting about Facebook than simply the fact that it caught on really quickly? There is a reason this story about a fight over money and creative credit got made into a movie and not any of the other stories like it, but this movie doesn't know what it is.
I recognize that that's not the story they wanted to tell and that what we have is without question a movie of quality. I just think there could have been a more exciting movie than this one about a group of people who are already millionaires fighting for a bigger piece of the billionaire pie. In the words of a certain famous musician, cry me a river.
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