“The Social Network” focused on Facebook founder and multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Freshly abandoned by his girlfriend ( Rooney Mara ), Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg ( Jesse Eisenberg ) sits down on his computer in autumn 2003 and writes angrily on a website on which students are asked to choose between two fellow students based on photos, The site gets huge interest and eventually even crashes the university network. Zuckerberg receives a suspended sentence from the university and is subsequently cut even more by women. But his next idea hits like a bomb. With his roommate Eduardo Saverin ( Andrew Garfield) as donor and CFO, Zuckerberg develops the initially uninternal social network, TheFacebook. When the idea soon spills over to other universities and slowly even more potential financiers become aware of the project, the huge success Zuckerberg quickly faces immense human and legal problems.
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The Social Network (2010) Official Trailer
At first glance, “The Social Network” is a common biopic. There are only a few historical figures who have been granted a similarly entertaining canvas monument to Mark Zuckerberg (and not only during his lifetime but already at the ridiculously young age of 26). Director Fincher sets a tremendous pace and leads quickly, but always stylishly through the early days of Facebook. Above all, the dialogs honed to perfection, which hit all the jargon wonderfully, inspire the high aristocratic slang of Harvards, the technical babble of nerds, the proletarian of the liaison parties and the prophetic-engaging business babble of Napster co-founder Sean Parker ( Justin Timberlake ). This quality is primarily due to author Aaron Sorkin who already won the award-winning White House series “ The West Wing” has shown how well he knows how to work his way into the language world of individual milieus. On the list of Oscar favorites for the best-adapted screenplay (based on the novel” Billionaire by chance: the foundation of Facebook – a story about sex, money, Friendship, and Fraud “by Ben Mezrich) is at the top.
“The Social Network” had been told from different perspectives, whereby the viewer never knows whose perspective he is actually following. The film begins with a ten-minute conversation in a pub, during which Zuckerman’s girlfriend breaks up with him. The future Facebook founder looks like a mixture of a self-centered nerd and arrogant asshole. A little later, however, the viewer learns that the whole scene corresponds to a legal statement by his ex-girlfriend and that Zuckerman himself insists that everything was very different. The foundation stone is thus laid: “The Social Network” is an intelligent game with cinematic realities, with which Fincher ultimately even questions the biopic genre to some extent.
In contrast, Fincher does not allow two opinions on Facebook itself. The forerunner was a website where students should be judged on their appearance. Facebook was invented to rise in the internal Harvard hierarchy and thus to get to women more easily. And the most important function is the relationship status anyway (staged in the film as a crime-like brainstorm, as TV commissioners always have shortly before they catch the killer) because everyone is always in the picture with whom the ex-girlfriend is or the neighbor from the physics lecture is currently driving. Everything is driven by sex. This is certainly not a new finding, but in “The Social Network” it is still brought to the point in an amusing and ironic manner.
Somewhere between autistic, arrogant and ingenious, Zuckerberg always does things that one can not approve of with the best will in the world. He is an uptight nerd who is only focused on his goals and has no eye for true friendship. Still the viewer keeps his fingers crossed for him and his Facebook project – and that is solely due to Jesse Eisenberg, who creates his character so cleverly between the underdog and the asshole that he pulls the audience to his side despite all his misdeeds. Andrew Garfield does his job as a booted-out companion very solidly but sets the least of the three main actors. Justin Timberlake who acts as an over-the-top, paranoid Web 2.0 guru, mimics the Mephistopheles seductress and so cleverly wraps Zuckerberg into a network of enthusiasm and megalomania.
Final Thoughts
” The Social Network “is an ambiguous and entertaining canvas biography, who does justice to her thoroughly ambivalent protagonists precisely because she cannot be carried away lightly to a final judgment. Facebook remains to be iconic in its own right giving birth to many marketing strategies. And while many agencies are born to take advantage of networks and search engines, other social networks started to sprout like mushrooms.