The Social Network
Damning Bio-Pic Recounts Rise of Ruthless Facebook Founder
The Social Network
Click to Buy via Amazon.com
Rated PG-13 for sexuality, profanity, and drug and alcohol use.
Running time: 121 Minutes
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Winner 2011 Golden Globe Motion Picture Drama
Film Review by Kam Williams
Excellent (4 stars)
In case you’re wondering what inspired camera shy Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse
Eisenberg) to make a rare public appearance on Oprah last week to give a
$100 million charitable donation to the City of Newark, you need to look no
further than The Social Network to find a plausible answer. For this damning
bio-pic portrays the reclusive Facebook founder as less a computer genius
than a ruthless fraud who deliberately stabbed everyone close to him in the
back en route to becoming the world’s youngest billionaire.
The seeds of Zuckerberg’s phenomenal success were sown back in 2003 when the
internet wunderkind was still an undergraduate at Harvard University. That
Fall, after hacking into the school’s database for photos of coeds, he
relied on an algorithm developed by his best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew
Garfield), to run a website called Face Mash where guys could rate female
classmates based on their looks.
At 10,000 hits per hour, the misogynistic blog generated enough traffic to
cause Harvard’s server to crash. And while the sexist stunt landed the
sophomore on academic probation, it also attracted the attention of a trio
of upperclassmen who had already been developing a social networking website
of their own.
Identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer), along with
Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), enlisted the assistance of the disgraced
Face Mash creator for his expertise as a programmer, suggesting that he
might simultaneously repair his reputation on campus by being associated
with their relatively-benign project. Zuckerberg agreed verbally, but
instead secretly proceeded to steal their idea, giving his partners the
shock of their lives a few months later when he not only launched Facebook
but excluded them from ownership.
Directed by David Fincher (Panic Room), The Social Network chronicles the
site’s meteoric rise from an exclusively Ivy League diversion to the daily
online destination of over a half-billion users. Thanks to a nonpareil
performance by Jesse Eisenberg as the paranoid Mark Zuckerberg, the
character-driven drama remains relentlessly-riveting for the duration.
Again and again, this despicable misanthrope exhibits a chilling malevolence
in his quest for control of the burgeoning internet empire, subtly resorting
to chicanery and criminal behavior to eliminate anyone he perceives as a
threat, his collaborators, investors, friends and foes alike. The scariest
screen villain in a half century, since Psycho’s Norman Bates, given that
this inscrutable creep actually exists in real life.