In 2003 Harvard Student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is charged with violating personal privacy after creating a website (while drunk) that bashes every undergrad girl in Harvard and charged with a six month academic probation. His ability to create a website in one night while drunk attracts the attention of the Wiklevoss Twins (both played by Armie Hammer) and their partner Divya Narendra hire Mark to build them a social network site called ConnectU. Mark later has a better idea and together with his best friend forms a social network sight to connect people from all over the world and revolutionize the college experience.
This was without a doubt my favorite movie of the year, even beating Inception and Toy Story 3. One of the things that made me really like is that it's a bitter cold movie about a bitter cold story. The Social Network is a movie about a revolution and while most revolutions are a hot passionate war this revolution is the opposite a bitter cold conflict between different people either face to face or chat to chat. A prime example is in Eisenberg's performance; when Eisenberg is acting he is either being a total nerd or acting calm and cold to insure victory in a conflict. Eisenberg wasn't the only actor I thought was good; Justin Timberlake plays a supporting character in the movie and actually does a really good job in helping Zuckerburg with launching facebook. I think the reason so many of the actors in this movie did so well is because they let the ice run through them and that builds up great tension and some very cold chemistry.
Something else I really liked about this movie was its similarities to a fictional piece named Dead Poet's Society. The Social Network is obviously not a ripoff of Dead Poet's Society but the feel of the film is similar. When I saw Dead Poet's Society I saw a bunch of boys that wanted to change the way they thought by thinking their own way instead of their fathers way while the Social Network deals with someone who is trying to use their mind to their full potential by sharing socialism with the world. The thing that these two theories have in common is that they both deal with using one's mind to their full extend and going past what people say are the bounders even if those boundaries can lead to dangerous situations. The last film David Fincher directed was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) which made my #3 in 2008. As much as I loved this movie I still thought The Social Network was a leap forward in Finchers career as a director. In both films the main character is the subject of the entire story and everything revolves around that said person but what makes the Social Network better is that it's much more realistic and better explores in to the inner circle of the main characters desires and fears but lacks the emotions in Benjamin Button. David Finchers films are usually very dark so when I heard his next project was a biography on the creator of facebook, I was basically shocked because facebook is the recess of the Internet.
I really do think that the ten billion people that use facebook are all apart of this movie. I say this because every person who uses facebook will want to at least consider to see this movie to understand what has led them to want to join facebook. Their is no point in joining something that's the most popular thing at the moment if you don't understand where it came from and what it planned to do from the beginning. When you walk out of this film you will understand that it's a two hour lawsuit that lead up to facebooks creation but that's what its trying to do. It wants the audience to understand the struggle Zuckerburgs struggle and how even if you piss off the most powerful people you know you can still keep your cool if you have the brains and faith in what you do.
My Rating 4/4 Shamrocks
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