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"The Social Network" is about a young man who possessed an uncanny ability to look into a system of unlimited possibilities and sense a winning move. His name is Mark Zuckerberg, he created Facebook, he became a billionaire in his early 20s, and he reminds me of the chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. There may be a touch of Asperger's syndrome in both: They possess genius but are tone-deaf in social situations. Example: It is inefficient to seek romance by using strict logic to demonstrate your intellectual arrogance.

David Fincher's film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.

It hurtles through two hours of spellbinding dialogue. It makes an untellable story clear and fascinating. It is said to be impossible to make a movie about a writer, because how can you show him only writing? It must also be impossible to make a movie about a computer programmer, because what is programming but writing in a language few people in the audience know? Yet Fincher and his writer, Aaron Sorkin , are able to explain the Facebook phenomenon in terms we can immediately understand, which is the reason 500 million of us have signed up.

To conceive of Facebook, Zuckerberg ( Jesse Eisenberg ) needed to know almost nothing about relationships or human nature (and apparently he didn't). What he needed was the ability to intuit a way to involve the human race in the Kevin Bacon Game. Remember that Kevin Bacon himself need not know more than a fraction of the people linking through him. Same on Facebook. I probably know 40 of my Facebook friends well, 100 glancingly, 200 by reputation. All the others are friends of friends. I can't remember the last time I received a Friend Request from anyone I didn't share at least one "Mutual Friend" with.

For the presence of Facebook, we possibly have to thank a woman named Erica ( Rooney Mara ). "The Social Network" begins with Erica's date with Zuckerberg. He nervously sips a beer and speed-talks through an aggressive interrogation. It's an exercise in sadistic conversational gamesmanship. Erica gets fed up, calls him an asshole and walks out.

Erica (a fictional character) is right, but at that moment she puts Zuckerberg in business. He goes home, has more beers and starts hacking into the "facebooks" of Harvard dorms to collect the head shots of campus women. He programs a page where they can be rated for their beauty. This is sexist and illegal, and proves so popular, it crashes the campus servers. After it's fertilized by a mundane website called "The Harvard Connection," Zuckerberg grows it into Facebook.

In theory, there are more possible moves on a chess board than molecules in the universe. Chessmasters cannot possibly calculate all of them, but using intuition, they can "see" a way through this near-infinity to a winning move. Nobody was ever better at chess than Bobby Fischer. Likewise, programming languages and techniques are widely known, but it was Zuckerberg who intuited how he could link them with a networking site. The genius of Facebook requires not psychological insight but its method of combining ego with interaction. Zuckerberg wanted to get revenge on all the women at Harvard. To do that, he involved them in a matrix that is still growing.

It's said there are child prodigies in only three areas: math, music and chess. These non-verbal areas require little maturity or knowledge of human nature, but a quick ability to perceive patterns, logical rules and linkages. I suspect computer programming may be a fourth area.

Zuckerberg may have had the insight that created Facebook, but he didn't do it alone in a room, and the movie gets a narration by cutting between depositions for lawsuits. Along the way, we get insights into the pecking order at Harvard, a campus where ability joins wealth and family as success factors. We meet the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer ), rich kids who believe Zuckerberg stole their "Harvard Connection" in making Facebook. We meet Eduardo Saverin ( Andrew Garfield ), Zuckerberg's roommate and best (only) friend, who was made CFO of the company, lent it the money that it needed to get started and was frozen out. And most memorably we meet Sean Parker ( Justin Timberlake ), the founder of two legendary web startups, Napster and Plaxo.

It is the mercurial Parker, just out of work but basked in fame and past success, who grabbed Zuckerberg by the ears and pulled him into the big time. He explained why Facebook needed to move to Silicon Valley. Why more money would come from venture capitalists than Eduardo would ever raise with his hat-in-hand visits to wealthy New Yorkers. And he tried, not successfully, to introduce Zuckerberg into the fast lane: big offices, wild parties, women, the availability of booze and cocaine.

Zuckerberg was not seduced by his lifestyle. He was uninterested in money, stayed in modest houses, didn't fall into drugs. A subtext the movie never comments on is the omnipresence of attractive Asian women. Most of them are smart Harvard undergrads, two of them (allied with Sean) are Victoria's Secret models, one (Christy, played by Brenda Song) is Eduardo's girlfriend. Zuckerberg himself doesn't have much of a social life onscreen, misses parties, would rather work. He has such tunnel vision he doesn't even register when Sean redrafts the financial arrangements to write himself in and Eduardo out.

The testimony in the depositions makes it clear there is a case to be made against Zuckerberg, many of them sins of omission. It's left to the final crawl to explain how they turned out. The point is to show an interaction of undergraduate chaos, enormous amounts of money and manic energy.

In an age when movie dialogue is dumbed and slowed down to suit slow-wits in the audience, the dialogue here has the velocity and snap of screwball comedy. Eisenberg, who has specialized in playing nice or clueless, is a heat-seeking missile in search of his own goals. Timberlake pulls off the tricky assignment of playing Sean Parker as both a hot shot and someone who engages Zuckerberg as an intellectual equal. Andrew Garfield evokes an honest friend who is not the right man to be CFO of the company that took off without him, but deserves sympathy.

"The Social Network" is a great film not because of its dazzling style or visual cleverness, but because it is splendidly well-made. Despite the baffling complications of computer programming, web strategy and big finance, Aaron Sorkin's screenplay makes it all clear, and we don't follow the story so much as get dragged along behind it. I saw it with an audience that seemed wrapped up in an unusual way: It was very, very interested.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Social Network (2010)

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language

120 minutes

Rashida Jones as Marilyn

Andrew Garfield as Eduardo

Justin Timberlake as Sean

Armie Hammer as Cameron/Tyler

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg

Max Minghella as Divya

Rooney Mara as Erica

Directed by

David Fincher
Aaron Sorkin

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The Social Network Reviews

A film by Fincher that, with a brilliant aesthetic, functions as the voice of expression of a generation silenced by the social isolation behind computers. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 24, 2024

There are plenty of pop psychology motivations seeded through the film... but they explain the protagonist about as much as Rosebud does in 'Citizen Kane.' This is a story of hubris and ambition, of friendship and jealousy, of class and cultural cache...

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

[David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin] elevate what could have been popular fodder into a serious, entertaining, and engaging drama that, through its depth and insight, regards business and social existence in the digital age with a critical eye.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 3, 2023

The Social Network will go down as one of the best movies of the 21st century, and potentially one of the best movies of all time. It’s Sorkin, Fincher, Eisenberg, and Garfield all at the top of their game.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The Social Network is another masterful piece of cinema, this time delivered by not one but two magnificent filmmakers. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin employ their mutual perfectionism and meticulousness to create an extraordinarily engaging narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 24, 2023

Equally absorbing are its themes of friendship and loyalty in a playground of petty politics. A superb Jesse Eisenberg as the insensitive, conflicted genius was a revelatory match for Fincher's technical talent.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

The Social Network is an electrifying look into Frankenstein's laboratory. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 20, 2022

The craft on display is impeccable like every Fincher production, and there’s an equally brilliant screenplay to support him.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | May 27, 2022

A perfectly poignant and cautionary tale about how the biggest influencers in tech began and continue to operate today.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

An emotional and suspenseful story...a moral tale about the sweet smell of success.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2021

Much, much better than a film about Facebook has any right to be...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2021

The Social Network posits that perhaps the tastiest cinematic treat is one that renders its audience gleefully captivated until they transcend into a fugue dream state.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

Who knew coding and depositions could be exciting? Fincher's direction is surgical, Sorkin's script is a thing of beauty and the young cast is superb. The Social Network is outstanding. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 5, 2021

The combination of rapid fire dialogue, driven performances, and impeccable editing give The Social Network an incredible sense of energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 3, 2021

A decade later, it plays more like a supervillain origin story. It's There Will Be Blood if Daniel Plainview was a dweeby computer programmer who drank lots of Mountain Dew.

Full Review | Dec 24, 2020

Decent intrigue, rivalrous backstabbing, and a little courtroom-style contention.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 30, 2020

The best of Aaron Sorkin's razor-sharp writing and David Fincher's visual style come together to bring to life the riveting true story...

Full Review | Oct 28, 2020

It's a gripping adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book, which paints Zuckerberg as both arrogant opportunist and naive underdog.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 3, 2020

An extraordinarily good film featuring a more disciplined Fincher, a more visual Sorkin, and a cast that works together to bring it all to vibrant and disturbing life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 23, 2020

Although the film has some very good qualities ... it didn't present the characters as any more than money hungry entrepreneurs ready to back stab anyone that stands in their way.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 13, 2020

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Movie Review | 'The Social Network'

Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular

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By Manohla Dargis

Sept. 23, 2010

What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.

The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.

(“The Social Network” opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)

Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.

The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.

Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.

The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.

The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”

Beyond the obvious (money, sex, fame) it’s hard to know what truly pushes Mark, whose personality emerges in furtive smiles, gushes of words and painful pauses. Eventually everyone does pay: the Winklevosses, Eduardo, even Mark. The filmmakers have their ideas about who did what to whom, but they don’t try to fill in all the blanks or, worse, soften Mark’s edges with a Psych 101 back story. You see what turns him on: software, revenge and, in several lightly comic and darkly foreboding scenes, Sean Parker, the flamboyant co-creator of Napster, who’s played by Justin Timberlake as a jittery seducer. Sean oozes into Mark’s life for a piece of the action and instantly dazzles the younger man with his bad-boy ways (coke and Champagne for everyone!), sexy dates and big, brash talk of riches.

Shooting in digital and working with the cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Mr. Fincher turns down the lights and tamps down his visual style, deploying fewer special-effects sleights of hand than he did in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” with its wizened and baby Brad Pitt, while also maintaining the familiar Fincher atmosphere of dread. Harvard has rarely been represented to such dolorous effect as in “The Social Network,” where even the colors seem leached of joy. A restrained, somber palette and the shallow depth of field express the limits of Mark’s world, while the rapid, seamless cutting among different times and spaces — scenes of him creating Facebook are woven together with scenes of him in separate depositions — evokes the speed of his success, giving the narrative terrific momentum.

Mr. Fincher pointedly abandons his smudged browns for a gauzily lighted sequence of the twins rowing at a tony British club that, with the edges of the image blurred and movements slowed, looks like a dream. This is a world of rarefied privilege in which men still wear straw boaters, and royalty blathers within earshot. Mark isn’t invited, not because he’s poor (he isn’t), but because this is a closed, self-reproducing system built on exclusivity and other entitlements, including privacy. (The movie refers to Mark’s being Jewish, and the twins look as if they crewed for the Hitler Youth, but that’s just part of the mix.) Mark doesn’t breach this citadel, he sidesteps it entirely by becoming one of the new information elite for whom data is power and who, depending on your view of the Internet, rallies the online mob behind him.

“The Social Network” takes place in the recognizable here and now, though there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with “The Matrix”) even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. (“To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman,” Balzac writes in “Le Père Goriot.”) The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.

“The Social Network” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual college high jinks, drugs, drinking and semi-naked women.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

The film, to be shown on Friday on the opening night of the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, opens nationally next Friday.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures. At 6 and 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Josh Pence (Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Brenda Song (Christy), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), John Getz (Sy), David Selby (Gage), Denise Grayson (Gretchen), Douglas Urbanski (Larry Summers), Aaron Sorkin (Ad Executive) and James Shanklin (Prince Albert).

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‘the social network’: film review.

"The Social Network" has as its protagonist a character drawn in a Shakespearean mode, a high-achieving individual who carries within him the seeds of his own destruction.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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'The Social Network' Review: Movie (2010)

This would, of course, be young Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the man behind the social-network phenomenon Facebook.

As the movie makes abundantly clear, the facts behind its founding are in dispute but, without a doubt, Zuckerberg did create Facebook. Yet far from celebrating this feat, the movie examines how a man who cares little about money became the world’s youngest billionaire yet lost his one true friend.

The Bottom Line A mesmerizing, bewildering and infuriating protagonist makes this movie about Facebook's creation a must-see.

At least that’s what the movie says happened. The film, written by Aaron Sorkin, is based on Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires” and Sorkin’s own research yet neither writer, predictably, was able to talk to Zuckerberg to get his point of view. So it is as a fictional construct — based on ample public sources, however — that “Mark Zuckerberg” achieves its Shakespearean dimension. He gains the whole world but loses his most meaningful asset because of a fatal flaw on view in the very first scene.

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THE SOCIAL NETWORK Review

Matt's review of David Fincher's The Social Network, which stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara.

David Fincher's The Social Network is not "The Facebook Movie". Yes, the plot centers on the creation of the landmark social networking website, but it's not about Facebook. It's about inspiration, betrayal, the weight of human relationships, the cost of success, and so much more. It just so happens that Facebook's creation story is a good way to explore these themes. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin thought to brilliantly tell that story through multiple perspectives, and Fincher's thoughtful and restrained direction showcases some of the best narrative editing in years. Add Sorkin's catchy, crackling dialogue and memorable performances from a terrific cast and it doesn't really matter that the film's about Facebook. What matters is that The Social Network is moviemaking at its finest.

The film kicks off with a rapid-fire, dialogue-heavy scene between Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his soon-to-be-girlfriend (Rooney Mara) that only Sorkin could write. It's an opening scene that most films would kill to have as it lays its protagonist bare while still keeping him intriguing and hints at the motives that would drive him to create one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative inventions of all-time. It's been said that "This is the movie Facebook (i.e. Zuckerberg) doesn't want you to see," but the Zuckerberg presented in The Social Network is almost a tragic figure. Every mean-spirited barb he throws out is something we wish we had the wit to say and yet the script and Eisenberg's phenomenal performance makes us pity the man who feels like he has to say such hurtful things in the first place. Where Facebook and Co. may take umbrage isn't in Mark's Sorkin-scripted-words, but Zuckerberg's supposed actions.

And it's in trying to show those actions that the film presents its killer story structure. The Social Network is told through two depositions for two different lawsuits. One lawsuit is from the Aryan poster-child twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and their partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) alleging that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook and forestalled the creation of a rival site. The other is from Zuckerberg's former friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). Through this layered storytelling, the notions of heroes and villains are laid aside and we see that on the road to the creation of this monumental website, there's enough credit/blame to go around.

Wandering into these shades of gray, Fincher has created his most restrained and subtle film to date. The Social Network could have easily fallen into a trap of over-stylized and distractingly-flashy effects, but Fincher must have realized he wasn't making "The MySpace Movie" and instead opted for approach that's as clean and crisp as Facebook's layout. Fincher finds his energy in the script, the acting, and with Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's superb editing. Watching Mark drunkenly burn through code as he hacks the websites of every dorm in Harvard is as exciting as most big-budget action scenes.

While Fincher's films always feature great performances, The Social Network is perhaps his most acting-reliant film to date and his cast does not disappoint. Eisenberg deserves an Oscar nomination for his work here. He doesn't take for granted that his character has some amazing lines and instead finds the humanity in someone so smart and yet so sad and angry. To argue whether or not he's doing an accurate representation of the real Mark Zuckerberg is missing the point completely. As a fully-realized person existing within the confines of the story being told, Eisneberg has crafted a character who is a tragic hero, anti-hero, and misunderstood evil genius all rolled up into one charismatic hoodie-and-sandals-wearing ball of energy.

Eisenberg steals the show a bit, but the rest of the cast turns in wonderful performances that show off the same restraint and balance seen in Fincher's directing. Garfield plays a sweet innocent but doesn't shy away from Saverin's foolishness. Justin Timberlake gives a smart performance as Sean Parker, a savvy entrepreneur whose opportunism never goes off to the point where it feels moustache-twirlingly nefarious. Hammer does wonderful work of putting us on the side of the Winklevoss Twins and how they wrestle with the question of whether they should handle the theft of their billion-dollar idea with dignity and honor, or just beat Zuckerberg into a fine powder. Everyone in this cast delivers and they make their characters more than just figures submitted for our adoration or scorn.

But my favorite aspect of The Social Network is the writing. I've been a huge fan of Sorkin for years. If A Few Good Men is playing on TV, I'll stop what I'm doing and watch it, and I refuse to acknowledge that The West Wing continued past season four. Sorkin's writing is sharp, witty, memorable, uplifting, thoughtful, and plenty of other positive adjectives that would slow down the flow of this sentence even more. The dialogue electrifies the scenes but never overshadows the pathos or rich thematic subtext, and using the depositions as framing device is a stroke of genius. Sorkin and Fincher balance each other perfectly and I hope that they'll collaborate again in the future.

All the individual elements of the film make The Social Network more than just the creation story of a popular website. When Fincher compares the movie to Citizen Kane or Sorkin compares it to Rashomon , they're not being self-congratulatory. They're being accurate, not just in how The Social Network shares themes or storytelling devices, but in overarching themes about deep regrets and complicated truths. You don't have to know what the "Like" button is or even like Facebook to appreciate this film. The Social Network is for people who like smart, entertaining, thoughtful, and emotionally-satisfying films.

The Social Network Review

Should you "like" this facebook movie from fincher & sorkin.

4 out of 5 Stars, 8/10 Score

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The Social Network (2010): Film Review

Joshua Stevens
March 19, 2023

The Social Network explores the origins Facebook and examines its founder, and remains a defining David Fincher film due to its direction, script, and score.

The Social Network accomplishes the near-impossible feat of defining both past and future generations . This David Fincher outing encapsulated the decade leading up to its release in 2010, while also serving as a warning for the decade that would follow. The message of how social media can be used to the detriment of others shines through the film’s direction, script, and music . This specific message about the potentially negative consequences of social media pinpoints the movie’s more universal themes: connection and isolation.

The drama follows young Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), beginning with his time as a student at Harvard. Over the course of the movie, Zuckerberg and friend Eduardo Saverin (an excellent Andrew Garfield) develop what would become Facebook, the most famous social media platform in the world. The film also sees Zuckerberg in the midst of two lawsuits , one from the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer), who claim Zuckerberg stole the idea of Facebook from them, and one from Saverin himself, who feels his former best friend had betrayed him.

David Fincher’s usual genre explorations made him a somewhat odd pick to direct The Social Network. Coming off projects like Se7en (1995) , Fight Club (1999), and Zodiac (2007), Fincher was able to channel the dark energy from those projects and apply it to the story of Facebook’s founding. Fans have come to expect certain traits when viewing a Fincher film, including a thematic exploration of the human psyche . Here, he combines those explorations with the role technology has played, and will continue to play, in society. He utilizes a non-linear structure to examine Zuckerberg’s rise to prominence, his flaws, and his virtues.

The film, based on 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires”by Ben Mezrich (with Saverin serving as a main source), takes liberties with this true story : the real Zuckerberg took issue with the film’s depiction of himself, particularly the party scenes, while Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has called it “a dramatization of history.” Though it may not be 100% accurate, the movie triumphs in another way: looking into the complex nature of intellectual property, friendship, and social media.

loud and clear reviews the social network review film 2010 movie fincher

The script , written by the legendary Aaron Sorkin, acts as the glue holding the entire film together. One may look no further than the opening scene between Zuckerberg and his date, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) to get a flavor for Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue and characterization. The scene, set to The White Stripes’ “Ball and Biscuit,” depicts Zuckerberg and Albright having a discussion over drinks. The conversation is fast paced, with Albright often struggling to keep up with Zuckerberg’s thought process. This leads to confusion, confrontation, and ultimately a break-up.

Sorkin’s script, in addition to driving the narrative, also serves an allegorical purpose: to showcase the confusion and confrontation that individuals may face in an online setting . He achieves this while also telling the audience something about the characters, especially Zuckerberg. The arrogance and detachment shown in this scene carries through to the end, where he sits alone at his computer screen, desperate for human interaction. There is much to dissect from this award-winning screenplay, but the core component is Sorkin’s ability to elevate this drama using clever dialogue and hidden messaging.

One overlooked aspect of The Social Network’s success lies in the film’s terrific score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross . The two men had done few scores at this point in their careers, and they were able to use their inexperience as an advantage, creating a truly unique musical sound for the film. Perhaps the most famous piece for the score is “Hand Covers Bruise,” a piece that consists mostly of a few simple piano notes, with persistent, lurking, buzzing strings sound in the background. “Hand Covers Bruise,” along with the rest of the score, accurately conveys both a need to prove oneself and a sense of profound loneliness . Zuckerberg’s loneliness is touched on throughout the entire film, and the score accurately reflects his status.

Fincher’s direction, Sorkin’s script and the musical score are just three examples of the mastery on display in The Social Network. This is a film that warrants further analysis, as the ramifications of social media have become even more clear since the movie’s release in 2010. How human beings connect, and how they can become isolated based on a variety of factors, is the key question at the heart of The Social Network. As time changes, and technology continues to evolve, these universal questions will continue to live on. This fact alone makes the film a timelessly relevant classic .

The Social Network is now available to watch on digital and on demand . Find out why The Social Network explores a side of college life not usually seen in movies .

Loud and Clear Reviews has an affiliate partnership with Apple, so we receive a share of the revenue from your purchase or streaming of the films when you click on the button on this page. This won’t affect how much you pay for them and helps us keep the site free for everyone.

TAGS: David Fincher , genre: biopic
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The Social Network – review

In 1492 Columbus set out to find a shorter route to the silks and spices of India and discovered the New World. Some 511 years and God knows how many new frontiers later, Mark Zuckerberg , a 19-year-old Harvard student, sat down at his computer one night to have a little malevolent fun and accidentally hit on the idea of Facebook, an event almost as momentous and, we're told, involving far more people than currently live in the United States.

Although the advocate of numerous explorers have contested Columbus's claims, no lawyers representing Leif Ericsson, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot or Francis Drake turned up at his door seeking their share of his fortune, as turned out to be the case with Zuckerberg. This indeed happens whenever anyone strikes gold today, and Zuckerberg's story as told in The Social Network is in some ways The Treasure of the Sierra Madre of cyberspace. It's also one of the most intelligent, pertinent and arresting movies of the past couple of years.

The movie is brilliantly scripted by Aaron Sorkin, author of the courtroom drama A Few Good Men and the TV series The West Wing , and incisively directed by David Fincher, whose films (among them Se7en , Fight Club , The Game and Zodiac ) show him to be a doubter of outward appearance, a questioner of accepted realities. It begins with an extended dialogue set in a Boston bar near the Harvard University campus in the autumn of 2003. The clever, articulate Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a Harvard sophomore, is having an edgy drink with a girlfriend, alternately courting and insulting her in a fashion that suggests a suspicious, contradictory nature, at once diffident and aggressive, anticipating and countering rejection. The slightly built, unprepossessing Eisenberg is a gifted specialist in troubled and troublesome young men, as he demonstrated in The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland , and this performance is a major addition to the gallery. The opening scene, which sets up what is to follow, ends with the girl telling him: "You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a tech geek, and I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."

Zuckerberg's response is to go drunkenly to his computer, hack into the university's data bank and create "Facemash", a college program that mocks all the girls on campus, making him a notorious celebrity to his peers and the subject of censure to the faculty. But this resentful Jewish outsider, who is excluded from the university's elite clubs, attracts the attentions of two insiders, the rich Wasp twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. These handsome oarsmen, heirs to old money, employ him to help create an exclusive site called Harvard Connection, with the less well-connected maths student Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) as their businessman. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg starts developing something he calls "Thefacebook" with seed money provided by his roommate Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

First slowly, then suddenly, and then exponentially, Zuckerberg's operation expands from college to college with the intervention of a dazzling but erratic entrepreneur (or webpreneur), Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). The creator of the controversial, shortlived music site Napster, he has major connections in Silicon valley but has never been nearer a university than sleeping with Stanford co-eds in Palo Alto. It appears that the charismatic Parker's first contribution is to hypnotise Zuckerberg, his second to marginalise Saverin, his third to hold out the prospect of big hedge-fund money, and the fourth to suggest shortening the title to "Facebook".

I say "it appears" because few things are absolutely clear in this story. So to save themselves from running a gauntlet of process servers reaching from California to Massachusetts, and to make clear that they have not one but half-a-dozen unreliable witnesses, Sorkin and Fincher adopted the wise strategy of turning the narrative into a courtroom drama. The action is constantly interrupted by Zuckerberg, Saverin, Parker, the Winklevoss twins and Narendra appearing in pre-trial hearings in which middle-aged lawyers seek to determine the facts and the past states of minds of these young former partners. Once brothers in an exciting new venture, they're now angrily divided, distrustful, and fighting over the ownership of an enterprise worth billions and rapidly expanding around the world, changing perceptions of what is public and what is private along the way.

The case was ultimately settled out of court with billions changing hands. Everyone involved signed confidentiality agreements that, ironically, commit them to the kind of personal prudence and privacy that Facebook – a key agent of invasion and exhibition – threatens to destroy. The character I find most sympathetic is the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, onetime Clinton's treasury secretary and a rather dubious figure in some ways. The arrogant, snobbish Winklevoss twins force their way into his office and attempt to use their family's social muscle to persuade him to crush the uncollegial Zuckerberg.

Summers kicks them out, telling them to move on and think up some other little invention in cyberspace. This is the funniest and to my mind most refreshing sequence in the movie, and it reminded me of the wonderful moment in Quiz Show when Paul Scofield, as the old-style literary academic Mark Van Doren, says dismissively of his son's depredations that "cheating on a quiz show is like plagiarising a comic strip". But both Summers and van Doren are men whose old-fashioned probity leaves them open to the charge of naivety when they fail to move with the times.

I should of course declare an interest, or possible lack of it, as I don't blog, tweet, text or surf and don't know my apps from my elbow. But The Social Network takes familiar ideas about trust, friendship, endeavour, ambition, betrayal and greed into fascinating new areas of experience. It's as riveting, lucid and open-minded a film as Rashomon .

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The Social Network – review

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Could it be that the person who founded Facebook, the man who connected so many individuals that the total defies belief (500 million and counting), is himself incapable of close personal friendship? Is it possible that the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, a 26-year-old whose creation unites people in 207 countries using 70 languages, is the loneliest guy on the planet?

If that sounds like a hell of a premise, you don’t know the half of it. Smartly written by Aaron Sorkin, directed to within an inch of its life by David Fincher and anchored by a perfectly pitched performance by Jesse Eisenberg, “The Social Network” is a barn-burner of a tale that unfolds at a splendid clip.

Yet, while nothing is more au courant than the Facebook phenomenon, “Social Network” succeeds because its story is the stuff of archetypal movie drama. It marries the tradition of present-at-the-creation epics like “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet,” “Madame Curie” and “Edison, the Man” with the familiar story of the corrupting power of ambition and success that allows audiences to feel, and not for the first time, that their ordinary lives have more meaning than those of the rich and famous.

Where “Social Network” departs from those earlier biopics is that, as played by Eisenberg, protagonist Mark Zuckerberg is introduced as extremely unlikable rather than heroic, a self-absorbed and arrogant 19-year-old Harvard sophomore who is as socially maladroit as he is fearsomely smart.

An actor who has nailed every discontented role he’s had, including “Roger Dodger,” “The Squid and the Whale” and “Adventureland,” Eisenberg excels as someone whose success is fueled, in classic movie fashion, by resentments of all shapes and sizes. His Zuckerberg is so consumed by the drive to get even and gain status that no one is a match for the combination of ruthless focus and disinterested frigidity he brings to the table.

The opportunity to simultaneously portray and dissect this kind of compelling yet distant individual is an ideal fit for Fincher. Presented with an involving central character cold enough to suit his chilly but considerable filmmaking talents, the director does his best work, convincingly presenting a story about conflicts over intellectual property as if it were a fast-paced James Bond thriller.

“Social Network” is fluidly shot by Jeff Cronenweth with convincing production design by Donald Graham Burt, both Fincher regulars, and the director also has the benefit of working with Sorkin’s strong and persuasive script. As fans of TV’s “The West Wing” well remember, Sorkin writes great crackling dialogue that dramatically represents the dynamics of power relations, and he puts that gift to great use here. Both his writing and the unnerving music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross bring so much propulsive energy to the project that resistance is all but futile.

Although the film is based on Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires,” Sorkin did his own research into the story and his treatment doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it. Though there has been talk of “Social Network” having Rashomon elements, that is something of a red herring. The film’s characters naturally have differing viewpoints and details are argued over, but the basic thrust of this tale never wavers, no matter whose eyes events are being told through.

“The Social Network” begins by positing that it was a very specific social resentment that got Zuckerberg started on his road to billions. The film opens at an undergraduate bar near the Harvard campus in the fall of 2003 with Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend Erica ( Rooney Mara, soon to be Lisbeth Salander in the Fincher-directed versions of the Stieg Larsson trilogy). Going out with him, she says tartly, is “like dating a Stairmaster.”

Furious at this rejection, Zuckerberg stomps back to his dorm and, with the help of roommate and best friend Eduardo Saverin (the gifted shape-shifter Andrew Garfield), takes revenge by doing some adroit hacking and coming up with Facemash, a site that enables students to vote on which Harvard women are the hottest. It gets 22,000 hits in two hours and crashes the university’s system.

That stunt attracts the attention of two of the school’s elite, rowers and identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (played, with the help of computer wizardry, by two unrelated actors, Armie Hammer and Josh Pence). They and friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) hire him to work on a university dating service they have in mind called Harvard Connection. Almost simultaneously, Zuckerberg, funded by best friend Saverin, starts “thefacebook,” which eventually morphs into you know what.

After these dynamics are established, “Social Network” jumps us a few years into the future, to separate but equally acrimonious lawsuits brought against Zuckerman by the Winklevosses and by Saverin, all of whom, albeit for different reasons, are upset enough with their erstwhile colleague and friend to drag him into legal proceedings.

Part of “Social Network’s” energy comes from the alacrity, courtesy of the brisk editing of Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, with which it jumps between the taking of two sets of depositions and the film’s depiction of the events that led to Facebook, and Zuckerberg, getting rich and famous. This includes the eventual involvement of Napster co-founder Sean Parker (a quite-convincing Justin Timberlake), a personality as seductive as he was divisive.

Another red herring about “Social Network” is how true to life these characterizations and this film are. It’s a red herring because movies, even well-intentioned documentaries, distort reality by their very nature. Zuckerberg’s adherents say the film is unfair to their man, and it may or may not be, but given that a New Yorker writer who interviewed him characterized the Facebook founder as “distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky,” Eisenberg’s characterization doesn’t seem that far off the mark.

All that really matters about “Social Network” is that it be convincing in movie terms, and it very much is that. Very likely gritting his teeth and agreeing is Zuckerberg himself. Someone who donated $100 million to the Newark, N.J., public schools just as this film was opening the New York Film Festival is probably worried that with all his billions he may forever be a prisoner of the film’s uncharitable portrayal, just as gifted actress Marion Davies was similarly blindsided by the talentless character based on her in “Citizen Kane.” Facebook may be powerful, but impressive movies have a force that cannot be denied.

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The Social Network: movie review

'The Social Network:' A story of betrayal on the road to glory. The knockabout beginnings of Facebook gets a fast-paced spin in the new movie 'The Social Network.'

By Peter Rainer Film critic

October 1, 2010

" The Social Network ," about Mark Zuckerberg and the knockabout beginnings of his creation, Facebook , is a prime example of an op-ed movie – a film so topical it transcends mere movieness.

Does this also mean it's great? Well, no, although you wouldn't know it from all the advance critical hoopla. Most movies are unconcerned with the real, roiling world of commerce and communication. "The Social Network," by contrast, depicts the Facebook enterprise as, like it or not, a cosmic cultural shift.

Director David Fincher and his screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (creator of " The West Wing "), loosely adapting Ben Mezrich 's nonfiction book "The Accidental Billionaires," are not uncynical about the ways in which this enterprise and its instigator racked up the betrayals on the road to glory. More often than not, Mark comes across as a soulless savant. (A more accurate title for this film might be "The Revenge of the Nerds .")

FACEBOOK FACTS, Hollywood fiction: Four things the move got wrong

These jaundiced filmmakers are nevertheless awed by the system that made Facebook possible. "The Social Network" is a warts-and-all celebration of visionary capitalism and of the moxie required to realize the vision. Mark is both the unlikeliest and likeliest of heroes – or, more precisely, antiheroes – for our time. He's a wolf in geek's clothing.

The problem is, the geek in question, at least as Jesse Eisenberg plays him, doesn't have the emotional expansiveness to fill out a movie. Perhaps sensing this, the filmmakers play out the story line from multiple points of view and crowd the stage with a pageant of voluble supporting characters. At times, Mark seems like a bit actor in his own fantasia, and although this dramatic ploy is no doubt intentional, it makes for a rather unwieldy (and overlong) odyssey.

It begins in the fall of 2003, when Mark, having just been dumped by his girlfriend and licking his wounds, retreats to his Harvard dormitory and hacks into the university's computers to create the site Facemash – a database of all the women on campus. Photos are lined up two at a time and users are asked to choose who is "hotter." The site is instantly so popular that Harvard's entire system crashes.

From these unseemly beginnings is born what eventually becomes Facebook, which quickly spreads beyond Harvard to become a global phenomenon. Along the way, Mark, who drops out of college after his sophomore year to run the business from Palo Alto , Calif. , inevitably runs a gantlet of accusations and recriminations.

He alienates his closest friend and Facebook's cofounder, Eduardo Saverin ( Andrew Garfield ), who sues him, and is likewise sued by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss , identical twin Harvard BMOCs who, with a whiff of WASP-ish disdain, claim Mark stole their idea. (In an amazing feat of filmic prestidigitation, Armie Hammer , with the assistance of Josh Pence as a body double, plays both brothers.) He also attracts the attentions of Napster founder Sean Parker ( Justin Timberlake ), who functions for Mark as a cross between Svengali and Eddie Haskell .

Fincher periodically intercuts his straightforward chronology with deposition scenes involving Mark and both Eduardo and the Winklevosses. In flashback, he presents " Rashomon "-style versions of what really happened and leaves it up to us to sort out the truth, or truthiness, of the claims.

From a legal standpoint, this is probably the only way that the filmmakers could have told this story without getting sued by everybody under the sun, but it also conveniently absolves them from taking a stand on the Facebook hoo-ha one way or the other. Since Mark is presented as a human cipher anyway, the deliberate ambiguity of the flashbacks registers as just one more blur in a fuzzy landscape.

The filmmakers trumpet the irony that an essentially friendless dweeb – the "Mark Zuckerberg" they created for this movie – founded the world's preeminent aggregator of friends (or, to be more exact, "friends"). But why is this such a surprise? If Mark had a raft of real friends he probably would not have felt the need (or had the time) to create a social-network engine. The virtuality of his life gave rise to the reality of Facebook.

Despite the whiz-bang topicality, the headlong intelligence, and the many sharp collegiate scenes – a testy meeting between the Winklevoss twins and Harvard president Lawrence Summers ( Douglas Urbanski ) is a classic – this new-style movie hews pretty closely to an old-style playbook. The filmmakers have talked it up as a classic story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and jealousy, but, with the exception of Eduardo, the cast of characters – beginning with Mark – are all aggressively one-dimensional. I scrutinized their scrimmages rather than becoming emotionally invested in them.

The filmmakers were probably thinking of Orson Welles 's Charles Foster Kane when they created their own soulless mogul. They even provide Mark with his own version of "Rosebud," the key that supposedly unlocks his psyche. Mark, it seems, created Facebook to get back at a girl he still pines for in the end. This faux Freudian soppiness is a disservice to Mark's rapacity, but still it gave me pause: How many other jilted geniuses are out there poised to unleash their newfangled networking whammies on us? Grade: B+ ( Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use, and language.)

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The social network, common sense media reviewers.

Fantastic performances, compelling story for teens and up.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

On the one hand, seeing all these young entreprene

They're big thinkers with great ideas, but many of

A couple of men nearly come to blows but are stopp

Sexuality is one of the main themes (and one of th

Lots of casual use of words like "s--t," "a--hole,

Obviously, the movie is a huge promo for Facebook,

College students drink like fish. Mark and his sop

Positive Messages

On the one hand, seeing all these young entrepreneurs be creative and innovative is a great example for teenagers, but some of the actions that lead to Facebook's success are shady and unfortunate.

Positive Role Models

They're big thinkers with great ideas, but many of the characters make questionable, borderline unethical decisions. Mark alienates and forces out his best friend, and he's accused of stealing the overall idea of Facebook from three other Harvard students. The character of Sean Parker is egomaniacal, parties a lot, and is the main catalyst for some of the uglier wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes.

Violence & Scariness

A couple of men nearly come to blows but are stopped by their friends before an actual punch is thrown. In one scene, security comes to escort a character after he violently destroys a laptop.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Sexuality is one of the main themes (and one of the major motivations for Facebook) of the movie. No graphic is sex depicted, but in one scene two young women take Mark and Eduardo to bathroom stalls, where they kiss passionately before the women take off the guys' belts and perform oral sex (you see one woman squat down before the camera cuts to the guy's ecstatic face). In another scene, a couple wakes up together but neither can remember much about the other -- including their names. The girl walks around in panties and a cutoff top. There's a scene of strip poker, and lots of women come on to the guys, make out with them, and dance around them while scantily clad. In an online pre-Facebook stunt, Mark pits women against each other for others to rank according to "hotness."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Lots of casual use of words like "s--t," "a--hole," "screw," "hell," and "bitch," and even a couple "f--k"s. Also "goddamn" and "oh my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Obviously, the movie is a huge promo for Facebook, even if the tale of its origins is at times deeply unflattering toward founder Mark Zuckerberg. Many other brands are also featured, including Gap, Livejournal, Heineken beer, and schools like Harvard, Stanford, Boston University, Columbia, and Yale.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

College students drink like fish. Mark and his sophomore roommates get drunk and stoned in their dorm rooms and at frat parties, dinners, and nightclubs. There's lots of beer, cocktails, and champagne drinking, as well as pot smoking and even lines of some drug (probaby cocaine) about to be consumed.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie about the creation of Facebook will appeal to media-savvy tweens and young teens, but there's so much sexuality, drug use, drinking, and swearing (lots of "a--hole," "bitch," and "s--t") that it's a better fit for older high schoolers. The sexual content includes scenes of strip poker, a scene set the morning after a one-night stand, bathroom-stall trysts (with implied oral sex), girls dancing nearly naked, and more. College students party a lot, so it's no surprise that there's plenty of drinking -- often to excess -- and drug use (mostly marijuana, but also cocaine). While teens will learn the value of being innovative, there are some very negative messages and role models in the movie. Ultimately, The Social Network isn't the typical "genius entrepreneur" biopic, because it's really a story about the personal price of success. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (24)
Kids say (123)

Based on 24 parent reviews

Phenomenal movie, but I wouldn't recommend for young teens

Outstanding film has language, sex and heavy drugs, what's the story.

In his sophomore year at Harvard, computer-science genius Mark Zuckerberg ( Jesse Eisenberg ) and his best friend, Eduardo Saverin ( Andrew Garfield ), create a site ranking their female classmates' hotness. It gets the attention of rich, entrepreneurial seniors Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and their business partner, who hire Zuckerberg to create a social networking site for Harvard students. But instead of working on the Harvard-only site, Zuckerberg asks Saverin to front him the start-up costs to launch what they call "thefacebook," which starts at Harvard but eventually spreads to other elite universities across the country. After the site hits Stanford, Zuckerberg and Saverin meet Napster co-founder Sean Parker ( Justin Timberlake ), who ingratiates himself into the founders' circle, usurps Saverin, and helps Zuckerberg get the funds to transform "thefacebook" into Facebook. In the process, Zuckerberg faces lawsuits from his Harvard rivals and his former best friend.

Is It Any Good?

There was a lot of pre-release hype for THE SOCIAL NETWORK -- and for once, the buzz is well-deserved. This is truly an enthralling film; all of the pieces -- writing, plot, direction, acting, soundtrack -- create a memorable, timely movie that couldn't be more relevant to the current zeitgeist. If a story about a business' Ivy League founders or Harvard social intrigue or young billionaires in the making doesn't sound compelling, this movie will surprise you. And the credit must go to director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, who've taken what sounds like a very boring premise -- boy genius possibly steals an idea to create one of the dominating media forces of the decade -- and turned it into an award-worthy film that even Facebook objectors will enjoy.

Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg as a socially awkward computer genius who isn't an adorable geek (like many of Eisenberg's previous roles). He's a huge jerk -- or, as his date tells him in the first scene, a first-class "a--hole" -- obsessed with status and, later, getting back at said date for rejecting him. How many multibillion dollar ideas started out as a way to show up someone who rejected the innovator? And how many business are built on the backs of broken friendships? As Saverin, British import Garfield is pitch perfect. He exudes the confidence that comes with wealthy, but unlike Zuckerberg or the Winklevoss twins, he's not condescending. In many ways, he's the heart of the movie, because his character is so much more likable than Zuckerberg -- so much so that you want him to win his lawsuit against Facebook. The movie's biggest scene-stealers are Timberlake -- who's all slimy and paranoid charm as Parker -- and the Winklevoss brothers, who are played by Hammer so well that you'd swear it was twin actors. Each twin is patrician perfection personified, and the fact that their social networking idea is the seed that Zuckerberg turns into Facebook serves as a slap in the face to their entitlement. What's true and what isn't doesn't quite matter for the purposes of this film; in the end Facebook's "status" is bigger than all its players.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Facebook and social networking . How have people's -- especially teens' -- lives changed as a result of Facebook's creation?

How accurate do you think the movie is? Why might filmmakers bend the facts (or take liberties in how a person is portrayed) when making a movie based on real life? How could you find out more if you wanted to?

What was the cost of Facebook's success for its founders? What is the movie's message about starting a huge enterprise? What does it take? What does it cost to succeed?

Does the founder of Facebook seem like a likable guy? Does this drama make you think less or more of him? Which of his many questionable choices makes him look the most unethical?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 1, 2010
On DVD or streaming : January 11, 2011
Cast : Andrew Garfield , Jesse Eisenberg , Justin Timberlake
Director : David Fincher
Studio : Columbia Pictures
Genre : Drama
Run time : 121 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language
Last updated : January 18, 2024

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The Social Network Review

15 Oct 2010

120 minutes

Social Network, The

Since making his debut with the disastrous Alien 3, David Fincher has struggled to find material worthy of his indisputable technical talent. This is nothing new; after Stanley Kubrick released Barry Lyndon in 1975 his assistant recalled hearing the nightly thud of books hitting the wall, until at last there was silence: Stanley had picked up Stephen King's The Shining, and the rest, of course, was history. Like Kubrick, Fincher has dabbled in a variety of genres too, but after the mixed reception afforded Benjamin Button, a respectable but strangely lightweight Oscar bid, The Social Network seems an unusual choice, even for him. It's talky, it's dorky, there's very little action, and, in the grand scheme of things, it's almost literally yesterday's news. But it has a quiet power, and, beneath the surface, there's perhaps more going on here than immediately meets the eye.

The Social Network is, first and foremost, about a paradox. It covers the founding of Facebook, a pioneering internet tool that, while bringing the world together, drove five individuals apart, and in doing so made its instigator, 26-year-old former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, recent history's youngest billionaire. Zuckerberg is played here by Jesse Eisenberg, who is simply superb as the conflicted genius, an emotionally isolated, social-climbing outsider with an unpredictable set of motivations and allegiances. Zuckerberg sets up his groundbreaking website for a number of reasons, partly out of spite, partly out of competition and partly because it's “cool”. But not, it seems, with anything as mundane, or forward-thinking, as a mission statement or a business plan.

Whether the real Zuckerberg is anything like this is another matter, and one that the filmmakers don't much care about (as a minor player says at the end, every creation story needs a demon). But if Zuckerberg is the moustache-twirling villain of this piece, the equally 'real' characters around him function with a similar degree of shorthand. Primarily, there is Andrew Garfield as the fresh-faced Eduardo Saverin, who is Zuckerberg's best friend at Harvard. Saverin gives Zuckerberg the money to start the operation, a loan of £1,000, but as the Facebook project grows, Saverin gets increasingly ostracised by his one-time best bud. In the meantime, also on Zuckerberg's elbow list are the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence). The twins are star Harvard rowers who employ Zuckerberg to help them develop their own website, but instead of doing what's asked of him, he leads them a merry dance, apparently stalling their project to give himself time to advance his own.

Into this maelstrom of conflict steps Napster founder Sean Parker, played with seductive relish by Justin Timberlake as a louche libertarian who appeals to all of Zuckerberg's most reckless instincts. Parker is presented as the catalyst that turns Zuckerberg from amateur to pro, which he does, over cocktails, with a single anecdote: the sad story of Roy Raymond, the bankrupt 47-year-old founder of Victoria's Secret who committed suicide in 1993 after the company he sold for $4m became a billion-dollar business. Zuckerberg seems to be drinking this in, or as much as he ever seems to be drinking anything in. In fact, part of the fun of Eisenberg's performance is that he never gives anything away, which works nicely alongside the wistful Garfield and Machiavellian Timberlake.

The Social Network's plus points are immediately visible, notably in a long pre-credits scene that sees Zuckerberg in a bar with his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara): Aaron Sorkin's rat-a-tat dialogue is established right there, and it never lets up. Likewise, Fincher's direction – comparatively restrained, except for an exhilarating, kinetic rowing sequence at the Henley Regatta – mostly aims for clarity and tight control. His colour palette is vital to this, being warm, sunny at times and even cosy in darkness, which comes in handy when zig-zagging between two potentially confusing timelines and two distinct court cases. The film's flaws, however, take a little longer to reveal themselves. For one thing, there isn't really that much to invest in; although Fincher gives it the adult veneer of a modern-day All The President's Men, the stakes aren't that high. This is a story in the public domain that's not about the public domain: its key players come from a rarefied world (indeed, the very first incarnation of Facebook, ironically enough, was deliberately exclusive and only available to subscribers with a Harvard email address). There's also the fact that Eisenberg, having dominated the first hour, suddenly steps back to make way for Garfield, and his presence is much missed.

That there's not a vast amount really going on here is beyond dispute, since there are no deaths or murders (so far) in this case, and not only are Zuckerberg's legal woes well documented, they barely add up to a paragraph on his rather skimpy Wikipedia page. So what would attract Sorkin and Fincher, 49 and 48 respectively, to such a slight story? The feeling that leaves the cinema with you is that The Social Network is intended as a portrait of the times, and its understatement is deliberate. Just 20 years ago, Wall Street was doing the same thing but bigger, with giant egos and huge deals. Now, although the payday-potential is even higher, the politics are those of the sandpit not the boardroom. Zuckerberg wants to be special, the centre of attention. Saverin is peeved that his best friend has a new best friend, and won't play with him any more. Meanwhile, the Winklevosses are stamping their feet because can't get a break: why, just because they're rich, they're handsome and they're excellent sportsmen, can't they be smart too? (Fincher has a lot of fun with that.)

It's hard to say how Fincher's film will be received today; indeed, Sorkin's last script, the concise and insightful Charlie Wilson's War still hasn't had its due, and in the UK, The Social Network's allusions to the social hierarchies within the US college system may not strike home. But it does have some interesting things to say, not just about the astonishing power that young people wield in the computer age (remember the line in In The Loop: “You know they're all kids in Washington. It's like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns”) but about the perspective that comes with youth.

The Social Network might even be a black comedy about that; Zuckerberg is obsessed with being cool, popular, first, but is he doing a good thing, and what about the social repercussions of his invention, which has since spread to every corner of the globe? Is he a crook? A rip-off artist? An arch manipulator? Fincher and Sorkin never close the book on any of these allegations, but they don't really need to because, in their version of the story, it doesn't matter. The closing song says it all: The Beatles' Baby You're A Rich Man, which asks the question, “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?” Zuckerberg doesn't know. But then, as the film slyly suggests, why would he? He's from a logged-in, left-out generation that knows little of beauty and even less of feeling.

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DVD & Streaming

The Social Network

Content caution.

In Theaters

October 1, 2010
Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg; Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin; Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker; Rooney Mara as Erica Albright

Home Release Date

January 11, 2011
David Fincher

Distributor

Columbia TriStar

Movie Review

Will you be my friend?

It’s a question pregnant with meaning, dependent on context. Said on a school playground it means something. Said in a singles bar or by a politician, it means something else. Said with a push of an online button, it might mean anything. With the advent of Facebook, people can be “friends” with strangers, enemies and coffee shops. And we begin to wonder what the word friend really means in the Information Age.

In a club near Harvard University in late 2003, Erica Albright tells Mark Zuckerberg—future businessman, future billionaire, future inventor of Facebook—that she just wants to be friends. She doesn’t mean it. Few do when they’re breaking up. Nor, perhaps, would Mark grasp the concept if she did. You get the sense, watching The Social Network , that Mark has little experience with friendship.

Arrogant, angry and oh so brilliant, he interacts with people as most would with a computer, relates to a computer as most would with people. And in the wake of Erica’s rejection, he flees to his dorm room and opens his soul to his laptop screen, flooding a blog with bitter put-downs and unspoken rejoinders—venting and processing perhaps the only way he knows. And while doing so, he patches together bits of code and unleashes a bit of vitriol on women in general—creating an online game of “who’s hot, who’s not” on the Harvard campus.

He calls his work Facemash, and it nearly gets him expelled, partly because he hacks into Harvard’s secure network to launch it. But it also earns him a measure of fame, of notoriety. It’s a taste of the popularity Mark pretends to eschew but obviously craves. Soon, members of Harvard’s ruling caste ask for his help in crafting a campus-only social network, and he agrees. But instead of hammering out code for his new employers, he begins working on a networking site of his own—a site he initially calls thefacebook.com .

Within days of launching, it’s the rage at Harvard. The following month, The Facebook expands to a handful of other campuses. Financially backed by roomie Eduardo Saverin, the site then earns a rabid following among tens of thousands of collegians around the world and interest from entrepreneurs. People are meeting, socializing and hooking up online. And friend instantly becomes a verb.

Mark didn’t understand friendship, The Social Network tells us, so he redefined it.

Positive Elements

The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires , written largely with the help of Eduardo Saverin. Little surprise, then, that the big-screen version of Eduardo is the film’s most sympathetic character.

Amiable and winsome, Eduardo is Mark’s only true friend. As the rest of Harvard ignores Mark, Eduardo supports him, both personally and—as The Facebook slowly takes flight—financially. He ponies up the first $1,000 for the venture, becoming Facebook’s chief financial officer, then sweetens the pot to $19,000 when Mark sets up shop in Palo Alto, Calif. He’s not the film’s hero, but its everyman. And it’s through Eduardo’s eyes that we see Facebook’s brilliant and brutal beginnings. He is, in some respects, a Horatio Alger character … ultimately betrayed by the American Way. He works hard and plays by the rules, only to find that the rules have changed around him.

Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are more extreme examples of this same dynamic. Wealthy and powerful, they represent old-school Harvard—including its semi-chivalrous code of conduct. They believe they came up with the idea for Facebook. But even when it seems obvious to them that Mark pilfered their idea and used it as his own, they decline at first to sue “because we’re gentlemen of Harvard.”

Such ideals seem quaint within The Social Network , but while the film chides the Winklevosses a little, it saves its harshest criticism for the amoral system that swept such notions of fair play aside. The new dot-com ethos, embodied by Napster founder Sean Parker, is smooth and brilliant and ethically vapid—with Sean serving as a postmodern Mephistopheles. As such, The Social Network becomes something of a morality play—a tragic paradox in which a site based on connectivity leaves its creators disconnected from what matters. Though you’ll find no real heroes here, The Social Network’ s narrative moral underpinnings are difficult to miss.

One specific item of positivity: The movie goes out of its way to remind moviegoers that just because a stray (hurtful) thought manages to skitter through their heads doesn’t mean they should write it down and post it to the Web. More on that in my conclusion.

Spiritual Elements

When Mark tiredly closes his eyes after launching The Facebook, someone facetiously asks him if he’s praying.

Sexual Content

The first time we meet Sean, he’s waking up in the dorm room of a Stanford undergrad. We see the Stanford woman in revealing underwear and, later, see her bare back as she removes a towel to get into the shower. We learn that Sean’s been involved with Facebook interns and other young women, too. He parties with several woman—one of whom takes off her blouse (we see her bra) so Sean and others can snort cocaine off her body.

But Parker’s far from the only character preoccupied with sex. As both Mark and Eduardo allude to, one of Facebook’s most popular features for the college set is its “relationship status.” It tells users, in Mark’s words, “Are you having sex or aren’t you?” We see students dance in underwear and play strip poker. Women kiss each other and cavort in a club wearing bikini-like outfits.

Two girls hit on Mark and Eduardo, and all of them end up in bathroom stalls. Between the two couples, we see pants being unbuckled and unzipped, shirts ripped open, groping, panting, etc. One girl moves down to give oral sex.

Victoria’s Secret gets a shout-out, and Mark discusses his ex-girlfriend’s bra size on his blog. He suggests to her that the only reason they gained access to a particular club is because she slept with the door guy. (She denies it.) A poster reads, “Big Boobs and Brains.” Someone makes a reference to necrophilia.

Violent Content

Several characters threaten, with varying degrees of seriousness, bodily harm to others—from hitting to using a Glock. Eduardo’s unhinged girlfriend nearly sets his apartment on fire when she purposely burns a gift he gave her. One of the Winklevosses breaks off a doorknob.

Crude or Profane Language

Two and a half f-words and nearly 20 s-words. Jesus’ and God’s names are abused a half-dozen times each. God’s is paired with “d‑‑n.” Other curse words include “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch” and “h‑‑‑.” Zuckerberg’s name is twisted into a crude expression. An obscene gesture is made.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Sean is busted by police for cocaine possession. He’s caught with the powder on his hands shortly after snorting a line off a girl’s stomach. We hear rumors that he’s used drugs before. Two girls share a gigantic bong. Others light up joints and/or cigarettes during a college party.

Lots of characters, many underage, down everything from beer to mixed drinks to whiskey. Mark admits that, as he creates Facemash, he’s a “little intoxicated.” And he’s fond of finding out whether others can code while drunk, forcing prospective Facebook techies into a wild drinking game while testing their abilities.

Other Negative Elements

Sean relishes the idea that Napster turned the music industry on its head by triggering the music piracy stampede. He comments that it might not have been a good business move, but it “p‑‑‑ed a lot of people off.” Eduardo loses his influence in Facebook through duplicitous means. When the police bust up a drug party, a row of college girls all lie about their age. We see a student throwing up during a hazing ritual.

Though based on real-world research, The Social Network is a work of fiction. Its characters bear recognizable names and some of the events they participate in truly did happen, but they may or may not actually be like their real-world counterparts. This is not a documentary. It’s a drama—albeit one that the real Mark Zuckerberg would rather you not see. As screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The West Wing) tells The Daily Beast , “He’s got right now—frankly, because of me—the whole world wondering if he’s an a‑‑hole, OK? He’s got to pick up the paper every day and see that.”

This film may indeed cause some to look at Zuckerberg—who seems to have more confidence and charisma than we see onscreen—in a harsher light. I doubt, however, that it’ll impact how folks use Zuckerberg’s landmark achievement. Those familiar with Facebook know how it’s used, misused and sometimes abused. Many probably know something about its recurring privacy issues and sneakily addictive games. Frankly, they probably know more about that sort of thing than Sorkin himself, who admits he doesn’t use Facebook. They’ll continue to use it if FarmVille stays fun and it allows them to stay in touch with Aunt Gertrude across the country. Whether Zuckerberg was a jerk when he created the thing will remain beside the point for most.

And the film’s makers seem to know this. The Social Network —a well-crafted story of modern-day creativity and greed—points a lot of fingers at Facebook’s creators, but talks very little about Facebook itself. We know it’s “addictive” because a Stanford coed tells us so. We know it’s a billion-dollar idea because Sean says it is. We know folks think it’s cool because we’re told how many students have flocked to it. But Sorkin and director David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club) spend very little time critiquing this mode of communication itself … except for this recurring caution:

Just as thefacebook.com is beginning to take off on the Harvard campus, Mark walks up to Erica and asks if he can speak with her alone. Erica shrugs him off. Why would he want to speak to her alone yet feel fine speaking about her to the entire school through his blog?

“The Internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark,” she tells him. “It’s written with ink.”

Facebook, like most other online modes of communication, is a tool—something which we can use for good or ill. (The good part better be true; Plugged In has its own page.) Zuckerberg’s creation has allowed us to connect to people in new and exciting ways, but it’s given us yet another avenue in which we can hurt or offend those we care about, too. Sometimes we write things we’d never say, post things we’re sometimes ashamed to even think. We actually live in the Too-Much-Information Age, where we confess not to a priest in the quiet confines of a church, but to an entire online universe.

The Social Network , if it has a practical message at all, tells us that the wonderful promise of online communication brings with it a cadre of new temptations and problems. And we’re shown some of those in an up-close-and-personal way. We’re told that the movie’s main characters never paused to consider such things. But we, the users, might want to do just that.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Screen Rant

The social network review.

Is 'The Social Network' really an Oscar-worthy film that defines a generation, or is it simply the story of how Facebook made some Harvard students into billionaires? Read our review and find out.

Screen Rant's Kofi Outlaw Reviews The Social Network

Facebook is a social media giant that has indisputably changed the world, affecting everything from how people share their lives, to how people market, promote and sell businesses, products and even their own talents. In fact, Facebook is so prevalent in our modern digital age that it even has the power to change the topography of culture, pop-culture, art, politics, and in rare cases, even religion.

Given that Facebook is what it is today, I must admit that it's somewhat surprising that it has taken this long for a movie to be made about its origins. And while that movie, The Social Network , is an interesting and visually rich exploration of the events that led up to arguably the most influential invention of a generation, a lackluster ending and overall feeling of pointlessness mark it well short of being the film which defines a generation.

By now the basic story behind the invention of Facebook is pretty well known: In 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) came up with an idea: take the entire social experience of Harvard and turn it into a comprehensive website in a way that other sites like MySpace and Friendster had never envisioned. Along with two of his programmer pals, and his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) supplying the startup capital, Zuckerberg created "The Facebook," an early blueprint of what would eventually become the social networking Juggernaut we know today.

Of course with any rose of an idea come thorns, and Zuckerberg's meteoric rise to fame (and infamy) comes at the cost of multiple legal skirmishes and shattered personal relationships. Being at the forefront of a trend can be be a lonely experience.

There is a lot about The Social Network that is impressive. The film was directed by David Fincher, the man behind some great pieces of cinema such as Se7en , Fight Club , Zodiac , and the Oscar-nominated Curious Case of Benjamin Button . Fincher fans generally know and love the acclaimed director for his three main signatures: a perfectionist attitude, impeccable camerawork and his dark yet vividly-colored cinematography. All three of those Fincher signatures can be found in The Social Network , offering viewers a feast for the eye. The early scenes set in Harvard are by far the most gorgeous, taking the historic university and giving it an edgy, dark, rock video sheen. I'm fairly sure Harvard has never looked so cool.

Fincher (with help from his screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin) structures the film in way that's somewhat surprising, yet at the same time refreshing and clever. Most memoir films are pretty linear in form (beginning of the event, up until the thematic climax), however The Social Network takes another approach. At first it seems as though we're getting the standard beginning-to-end structure, but around the 20-30 minute mark the film suddenly begins to jump around in space and time, showing Zuckerberg caught up in the midst of various legal battles.

It's a bit jarring at first, until Fincher eases us into the realization that it's actually the conversations in these legal depositions that are driving the story. Lawyers ask questions, and the answers lead to flashbacks about Facebook's inception; what is revealed in those flashbacks lead to further legal questions which jump us yet again to one deposition or another, as Zuckerberg tries to defend "his creation" from various attackers. It sounds more confusing than it actually is; in the hands of a skilled orchestrator like Fincher, this unique structure works to the movie's benefit, adding a sense of movement to what could've been a boring film, otherwise.

The performances are pretty spectacular - especially those of the two leads, Eisenberg and Garfield. Eisenberg has been tagged in some circles as "the other Michael Cera," referring to the latter actor's penchant for playing the loveable nerd in virtually every role he takes on. This is not at all true for Eisenberg, who portrays Mark Zuckerberg as something of a tragically ironic figure: an acerbic genius who is totally clueless when it comes to human interaction; a guy who earns fortune and fame off a website dedicated to social circling, but has very few "real friends" to call his own.

Eisenberg flat-out steals just about every scene he's in, glaring at people around him like they are nitwits, while delivering scathing insights that could make a person feel that very way. A definite standout performance that is worthy of recognition (provided people don't find his character too unlikable).

Andrew Garfield is a fast-rising star: he's already been tapped as the new Spider-Man in Sony's reboot of that franchise, and he has another prestige picture, Never Let Me Go , due out this fall. Here, Garfield plays a near-perfect straight man foil to Eisenberg's eccentric genius. Eduardo Saverin is the type of smart kid who (ironically enough) prefers the actual social experience of college to sitting in dim-lit dorm rooms creating an online imitation of it. Garfield successfully builds Saverin into a three-dimensional character with a range of a emotions, a slightly naive kid caught up in a gold rush that is moving way too fast for him (or anyone) to keep ahead of.

The scenes of Saverin and Zuckerberg in their happy days at Harvard juxtapose well to the later days when they're ultimately sitting across the table from one another, talking through lawyers. The climatic scene of their falling out actually packs some emotional punch, which is a credit that goes directly to the talents of both young men.

Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the inventor of Napster who eventually partners with Zuckerberg to transform Facebook into the behemoth it is today. Timberlake manages to shed his celebrity image and slip into his role pretty well, portraying Parker as an extremely savvy businessman who is simultaneously chock full of B.S.. All in all, Timberlake continues to prove that he is not the joke of an actor some people may want to label him as.

Continue to the disappointing aspects of The Social Network ...

I've discussed what impressed me about The Social Network , now I must address what disappointed me. That would be the script by Aaron Sorkin. Let me be clear: Sorkin's script tears out of the gate crackling with energy, good pacing and whip-smart dialogue. This a film with almost no physical action, and so the conversations between characters had to be totally engaging and amusing for The Social Network to have any traction at all. Sorkin rises to that challenge.

The problem (for me at least) is that the film starts with a bang but ends with a fizzle. The opening scene (a conversation between Zuckerberg and his ex-girlfriend, played by Rooney Mara) is one of the best I've seen since Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds , and instills confidence early on that "the Facebook movie" might be more dynamic and entertaining than expected. As I've said, the dialogue is sharp, crisp, hip and thoroughly entertaining, however it's the presence of a larger point to the story that seems to be missing from The Social Network .

Sure, the film has a point - only it's one that becomes all too obvious far too early, and is hammered on again and again throughout the film's final act, just in case anyone in the audience is too obtuse to get it. The themes of Sorkin's script are also pretty cliched: legal battles and lost friends are practically rites of passage in the rise to fame and fortune in America - we've seen this story many times before. By the time the big fallout between Zuckerberg and Saverin plays out, despite how well it's executed, I was left feeling somewhat underwhelmed.

To be honest, I believe Sorkin committed one of the greatest sins of storytelling: missing the opportunity to both look deeper and say something bigger. Part of what makes The Social Network 's first third so engaging is that we get to see Zuckerberg actually interacting in the digital realm he is about to revolutionize. We hear entries from his Live Journal blog in voiceover, see him creating other, smaller, web projects and watch him squirming between a digital realm where he's a virtual god, and the real world where he's a hapless loser. For me, this opening act was the most interesting thing the film offered - a larger commentary about how we all navigate life and "reality" in a digital age where our online profiles, blogs and Tweets have begun to define us more than our flesh and blood actions can.

However, by the time the movie hits its midpoint, Sorkin's script loses a good deal of steam, settling into a standard narrative of wealth, fame, power, and the relationships fractured as a result. The script also strangely diverts its focus away from Zuckerberg and onto some of the secondary characters such as Saverin, Parker, or (oddly enough) a trio of Harvard students who also sue Zuckerberg over Facebook. Combined, the jumps between characters, times and places quickly wears the film's unique structure thin, and worse, made me start to wonder what the point was.

There's also one glaring problem with telling this story at all: the history of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is still being written. How can Sorkin fashion a story that feels complete when the person the story is about has not yet completed his arch? If Facebook's role in our lives is still evolving, what point is there to be made about its creation - that it cost Zuckerberg friends and gave him legal headaches? As I said, that's a cliched story, but more to the point: most people would argue that becoming a multi-billionaire in your twenties is worth it. For those people - who believe the rewards justify the struggle - The Social Network is going to have little insight to offer.

It's only in the closing minutes of the film that Sorkin's script returns to the intriguing theme offered by the opening act: how Zuckerberg's online persona coincides with his real-world experience. I think Sorkin and Fincher felt they were being deep and profound by closing things off that way; in my opinion, The Social Network might've truly been 'the film that defined a generation' had that question been explored at greater length. As it stands, this is pretty much the story about how a couple of Harvard kids got rich off of the Internet.

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The Social Network

As Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, he is sued by the twins who claimed he stole their idea and by the co-founder who w... Read all As Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, he is sued by the twins who claimed he stole their idea and by the co-founder who was later squeezed out of the business. As Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, he is sued by the twins who claimed he stole their idea and by the co-founder who was later squeezed out of the business.

David Fincher
Aaron Sorkin
Ben Mezrich
Jesse Eisenberg
Andrew Garfield
Justin Timberlake
1K User reviews
438 Critic reviews
95 Metascore
173 wins & 187 nominations total

Mark Zuckerberg

Eduardo Saverin

Sean Parker

Erica Albright
Billy Olson

Phoenix Club President

Dustin Moskovitz
Chris Hughes

Phoenix Member Playing Facemash
Girl at Phoenix Club
Student Playing Facemash

Erica's Roommate

B.U. Guy in Bra

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Trivia During one of the depositions, it is mentioned that the invention of Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg "the biggest thing on a campus that included nineteen Nobel Laureates, fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners, two future Olympians, and a movie star." One of the lawyers then asks, "Who was the movie star?" and the response is, "Does it matter?" This movie star was, in fact, Natalie Portman , who was enrolled at Harvard from 1999 to 2003, at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg . She invited Aaron Sorkin to a dinner party with her Harvard friends to provide him insider information on the school's social life at the time Facebook was created.
Goofs In the meeting Eduardo has with the lawyer to discuss the new stock options he is given the following breakdown on stock ownership: Eduardo 34.4%, Dustin 6.81%, Sean 6.47%, Mark 51% and Thiel 7%. These total up to 105.68%.

Gage : Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?

Mark Zuckerberg : [stares out the window] No.

Gage : Do you think I deserve it?

Mark Zuckerberg : [looks at Gage] What?

Gage : Do you think I deserve your full attention?

Mark Zuckerberg : I had to swear an oath before we began this deposition, and I don't want to perjure myself, so I have a legal obligation to say no.

Gage : Okay - no. You don't think I deserve your attention.

Mark Zuckerberg : I think if your clients want to sit on my shoulders and call themselves tall, they have the right to give it a try - but there's no requirement that I enjoy sitting here listening to people lie. You have part of my attention - you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

Mark Zuckerberg : Did I adequately answer your condescending question?

Alternate versions There is an Unrated cut of the film that only includes an extra use of the word "fuck".
Connections Featured in The Rotten Tomatoes Show: Inception/Predators/The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)
Soundtracks Ball And Biscuit Written by Jack White (as Jack White III) Performed by The White Stripes Courtesy of Third Man Records and Courtesy of XL Recordings Ltd.

User reviews 1K

roastmary-1
Dec 4, 2010

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How long is The Social Network? Powered by Alexa
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Why did Eduardo want to expand Facebook to Stanford?
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October 1, 2010 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official site
Mạng Xã Hội
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Columbia Pictures
Relativity Media
Scott Rudin Productions
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$40,000,000 (estimated)
$96,962,694
$22,445,653
Oct 3, 2010
$224,927,749

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Runtime 2 hours
Dolby Digital
Dolby Surround 7.1
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The Social Network

PG-13 | drama | 2 HR 0 MIN | 2010

David Fincher directs Jesse Eisenberg alongside an all-star cast in this Oscar-winning biographical drama that centers on Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg and the conception of the revolutionary social networking website: Facebook.

'The Antisocial Network' Is Here to Answer All Your Questions about 4chan

By Diana Helmuth | Film | March 28, 2024 |

The Antisocial Network is a documentary that manages to thread a very difficult needle: explaining the website 4chan — whose goal is to offend all who witness it — in sympathetic terms.

Filmmakers Georgio Angelini and Arthur Jones describe it as something of a sequel to their 2020 documentary Feels Good Man , which detailed the story of the Pepe the Frog meme and its creator’s struggle to reclaim it from online communities of white supremacists. The Antisocial Network goes much broader than one meme, however. Angelini and Jones are here to explain how the subversive internet joke culture on 4chan transformed into conspiracy theory culture that ultimately helped feed the country’s alt-right and foment the January 6 insurgency.

Although this is the advertised thesis in the trailer, in reality, it sells the movie a bit short. The Antisocial Network is really a documentary about the power of internet trolls and how edgelording can be weaponized in the real world for a variety of political causes.

The film doesn’t use the voyeuristic narrative pattern that so many other storytellers fall prey to when they examine underbelly internet communities. This is not Jane Goodall watching chimps. Here, the examined subjects have mics and are talking about their experiences with mild contrition, nostalgia, and clear-eyed candor. We hear from a series of professional journalists and authors of early internet culture, but also early 2000s 4chan stars, forum founders, and hackers under active FBI investigation. Getting these folks to talk on camera is not an easy feat, and Angelini and Jones had to do no amount of favor pulling and coaxing. The resulting narrative feels authentic and balanced and is full of audience treats. Such as, seeing forefront members of Anonymous with their masks off.

The entire first half of the film is a journey back into the early 2000s internet, a time when you had to monopolize your entire household’s phone line just to check your email, and teenagers became de facto computer hardware experts in the pursuit of gigabyte-sized hits of dopamine. It’s not exactly a love letter to early internet culture, but it’s an honest portrayal that will make you nostalgic if you were there. Jones added motion graphics to a series of ancient memes, making them jump (sometimes painfully) back to life.

As the film goes on, we are taken through a history lesson of how Japanese message board 2chan beget 4chan beget Anonymous, and from there, how GamerGate begets 8Chan, and ultimately, with some not-so-secret help from Steve Bannon, how it progressed to QAnon. I’ve known these groups were interconnected for some time, but will confess to never having understood the full family tree. I had several friends (who would today consider themselves left-leaning) who spent many a happy evening hanging out on 4chan in the early 2000s. How did teenagers on an edgy anime message board come to be associated with a group that stormed the capital in the name of America’s first would-be dictator? This documentary answers that question, following the threads of the different groups that were born out of 4chan, including how they began to disagree over what, exactly, shouldn’t be laughed at.

This film does as good a job as I think is humanly possible to explain how jokes like “there are no girls on the internet,” “the rape train has no breaks” and “pool is closed due to AIDS” were somehow funny in the early 2000s to a large group of people who would today call themselves liberals, antiracists, and feminists. It’s debatable if these jokes were funny back in 2004, but the point of the documentary is to elucidate how they thrived. 4 chan was a community built on mutual shock and one-upmanship. In the Q&A after the screening, Angelini and Jones confessed that Netflix had pushed back on the movie’s inclusion of the Habbo Hotel stunt —- when Anonymous staged an antiracist takeover of the online game Habbo Hotel that ended up being more racist than the racism it was supposedly combatting. Jones and Angelini had to explain to Netflix why the narrative of the film simply would not make sense without going into the layered irony of this stunt and all stunts like it.

Because that’s what this doc is really about exploring what happens when a community of unsupervised teenage edgelords, who just wanted to one-up each other on message boards with increasingly offensive jokes, took their “don’t tell me what I can’t laugh at” energy into the real world. Sometimes the results of this were what my liberal leanings would call “good” (supporting Occupy Wall Street, taking down neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner), and sometimes they were “bad” (trying to convince the world Hillary Clinton was a pedophile, breaking into the capitol on January 6th). Angelini and Jones illustrate that the key motivation tying all of these apparently disparate events together was not politics, per se. It was the desire to simply get a rise out of those who thought they were in charge. “We did it because we wanted to fuck with people,” says one early 4chan user. “Not because of our political beliefs.”

There are several other historical moments that were conceived in 4chan that I wish the doc would have explored. Such as how, during the 2016 election, 4chan users said they would vote either for anti-establishment Bernie or Trump, but never Hillary. I can only assume there were heaps of tangents like this left on the cutting room floor. As it is, Angelini and Jones have created a surprisingly tight and cohesive story out of a massive chunk of internet history. If anything, I wish this had been a mini-series instead of a single film, so they could get more into the weeds.

A background animation motif plays through the film, featuring dead-eyed, cartoon bodies suspended in midair by (what else?) a series of tubes. Occasionally, an angry human figure rises up and punches through his pixelated neon sky, tumbling into our world. This animation is splendidly done by Chromosphere Studio, and the metaphor is clear: dopamine addicts get sucked into an online world that robs them of clear thought, then break back into our world with disastrous consequences. The connection between 8chan, QAnon and Jan 6th appears only in the last quarter of the movie, and feels a touch rushed. As the doc comes to a close, it gently pushes the point that the secret to undoing all the conspiracy theory damage resulting from 4chan and 8chan is for people to get offline and go touch grass. These are the parting words of Moot, the kid who invented 4chan and now wants nothing to do with it. The film gently tells internet addicts: “You can graduate from that darkness.”

I’ll confess this struck me as a trite conclusion; we’re hearing a variant of this statement a lot lately, and we know none of us are actually going to do it. Angelini and Jones do a great job explaining how an online anime message board became kindling for domestic terrorism, and how this group of people whose sole motivation in life was fucking up anyone who tried to tell them what they couldn’t laugh at got soundly duped into undermining democracy (quite specifically, by Steve Bannon). But I can’t help but also notice that half the documentary involuntarily proves that people coming together online is not the actual problem. Anonymous, despite their trollish motivations, pulled off feats many liberals still consider admirable. Furthermore, people coming together online have brought about the Arab Spring, BLM, and efforts toward unionization. The trailer of this doc seems to want to blame internet addiction for the violence of January 6. It makes this point, but it makes several other more interesting points, too. I left the theater comparing 4chan users to a chainsaw. They can be used for good or bad, depending on the goal. Perhaps the real point is simply that — despite how they might fancy themselves — they can be used.

I would be curious if anyone on the alt-right would have their minds changed by this documentary. If you are a Democrat, wondering how, exactly, QAnon is connected to Cheese Pizza, Anime and Rick Astley, you will find answers here. If you grew up on the early internet, you’ll have a chance to appreciate how far your sense of humor has come (or not). Either way, this is an important and strangely entertaining movie for understanding the origins of the online conspiracy theories that propped up Donald Trump and led to the violence of January 6. However, it also reveals how the contrarian energy of online trolls can be channeled en masse towards various causes. It even ends on something of a hopeful note, which is itself rather remarkable.

‘The Antisocial Network’ screened at the 2024 SXSW Film and TV Festival. It is streaming on Netflix April 5th, 2024.

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COMMENTS

The Social Network movie review (2010)
"The Social Network" is about a young man who possessed an uncanny ability to look into a system of unlimited possibilities and sense a winning move. His name is Mark Zuckerberg, he created Facebook, he became a billionaire in his early 20s, and he reminds me of the chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. There may be a touch of Asperger's syndrome in both: They possess genius but are tone-deaf in social ...
The Social Network
The Social Network will go down as one of the best movies of the 21st century, and potentially one of the best movies of all time. It's Sorkin, Fincher, Eisenberg, and Garfield all at the top of ...
The Social Network
The Social Network - review. David Fincher captures the spiteful personalities and hyperactive spirit of the age with the story of Facebook's creation, writes Peter Bradshaw. F rom the first ...
'The Social Network' 10 Years Later: A Grim Online Life Foretold
By Maya Phillips. Oct. 5, 2020. Ten years ago, the director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin gave us a deliciously scored origin myth to one of the defining online institutions of this ...
The Social Network
The Social Network is an electrifying look into Frankenstein's laboratory. [Full review in Spanish] Full Review | Jul 20, 2022. The craft on display is impeccable like every Fincher production ...
A Facebook Creation Story With Mark Zuckerberg
Directed by David Fincher. Biography, Drama. PG-13. 2 hours. By Manohla Dargis. Sept. 23, 2010. What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In "The Social Network," David Fincher's fleet, weirdly funny ...
'The Social Network' Review: Movie (2010)
'The Social Network': Film Review ... Then the rest of the movie, in an inspired move by Sorkin, takes place at legal depositions. Because a few years later, Facebook is a billion-dollar ...
THE SOCIAL NETWORK Movie Review
Matt's review of David Fincher's The Social Network, which stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara.
The Social Network
On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. In a fury of blogging and programming, what begins in his dorm room soon becomes a global social network and a revolution in communication. A mere six years and 500 million friends later, Mark Zuckerberg is the ...
The Social Network (2010)
42 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com. 100. Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond. With a thieves den of borderline-Shakespearian characters, a wickedly literate screenplay, potent direction by David Fincher, an exceptional ensemble cast and subject matter that speaks to a generation and well beyond, The Social Network is mesmerizing. 100.
The Social Network Review
The Social Network is a gripping, expertly made and wonderfully performed character study, a very modern story about some very classic themes. But as great as the film is, you can't overlook the ...
The Social Network (2010)
Fincher took Aaron Sorkin's brilliantly clever screenplay and turned it into a film that highlights the best and worst moments of out technology-based life. The Social Network's first scene is brilliantly written and acted, and it sets the mood that both Fincher and Sorkin want to set for the rest of the film.
The Social Network (2010): Film Review
The Social Network (2010): Film Review. Joshua Stevens. March 19, 2023. The Social Network explores the origins Facebook and examines its founder, and remains a defining David Fincher film due to its direction, script, and score. The Social Network accomplishes the near-impossible feat of defining both past and future generations.
The Social Network
The Social Network - review This article is more than 13 years old The tale of how Mark Zuckerberg hit on the idea of Facebook is a riveting movie about friendship and greed
Movie review: 'The Social Network'
Although the film is based on Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Billionaires," Sorkin did his own research into the story and his treatment doesn't have an ounce of fat on it. Though there has ...
The Social Network: movie review
"The Social Network," about Mark Zuckerberg and the knockabout beginnings of his creation, Facebook, is a prime example of an op-ed movie - a film so topical it transcends mere movieness.
The Social Network Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 24 ): Kids say ( 123 ): There was a lot of pre-release hype for THE SOCIAL NETWORK -- and for once, the buzz is well-deserved. This is truly an enthralling film; all of the pieces -- writing, plot, direction, acting, soundtrack -- create a memorable, timely movie that couldn't be more relevant to the current zeitgeist.
The Social Network Review
The Social Network Review. Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) has been dumped by his girlfriend, so, in revenge, he writes a savage blog about her and hacks into all the local ...
The Social Network
Positive Elements. The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, written largely with the help of Eduardo Saverin.Little surprise, then, that the big-screen version of Eduardo is the film's most sympathetic character. Amiable and winsome, Eduardo is Mark's only true friend.
The Social Network Review
The Social Network Review. By Kofi Outlaw Published Sep 25, 2010. Is 'The Social Network' really an Oscar-worthy film that defines a generation, or is it simply the story of how Facebook made some Harvard students into billionaires? ... And while that movie, The Social Network, is an interesting and visually rich exploration of the events that ...
The Social Network Movie Review and Analysis
The constrictive depth of field makes characters seem like they're suffocating in their own environments and makes us claustrophobic, and Fincher giving The Social Network the same visual cues as his serial killer films was genius. To make facemash.com, Mark had a series of computer moves well beyond the comprehension of 95% of the audience.
The Social Network (2010)
The Social Network: Directed by David Fincher. With Jesse Eisenberg, Rooney Mara, Bryan Barter, Dustin Fitzsimons. As Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, he is sued by the twins who claimed he stole their idea and by the co-founder who was later squeezed out of the business.
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich.It portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook.It stars Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, Armie Hammer ...
The Social Network
The Social Network. David Fincher directs Jesse Eisenberg alongside an all-star cast in this Oscar-winning biographical drama that centers on Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg and the conception of the revolutionary social networking website: Facebook. Watch The Social Network online at HBO.com. Stream on any device any time.
'The Antisocial Network' Is Here to Answer All Your Questions ...
The Antisocial Network is a documentary that manages to thread a very difficult needle: explaining the website 4chan — whose goal is to offend all who witness it — in sympathetic terms.. Filmmakers Georgio Angelini and Arthur Jones describe it as something of a sequel to their 2020 documentary Feels Good Man, which detailed the story of the Pepe the Frog meme and its creator's struggle ...

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