On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg 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 youngest billionaire in history… but for this entrepreneur, success leads to both personal and legal complications.
When I heard a facebook movie was getting made I really didn’t think to much about it and really who would want to watch a movie about a website but then Fincher got attached to direct, so I got a bit intrigued then Sorkin was added to adapt the book and that tweaked me a bit more, but then finally Trent Reznor was tapped to do the Music! So right there I was hooked. Between David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin there is a rather impressive resume Fincher was the director for such movies as ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Seven’ and is currently working on ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Sorkin has been a writer for some of the most impressive TV Series’ to date one of them being ‘The West Wing’ he also penned ‘A Few Good Men’ and ‘The American President’ so between the two of them you can see a recipe for success.
Looking at the history of facebook I didn’t really know much about it and I wanted to keep myself in the dark per say so I stayed away from Wikipedia and walked into the movie blind but after watching it I think I spent a good few hours trawling the net looking at interviews the wiki and basically googling everything. With an impressive young cast including Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland) who played the worlds youngest billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake who portrayed the Napster creator Sean Parker, Andrew Garfield as Zuckerbergs ‘business partner’ and Armie Hammer as the Twins Cameron/Tyler Winklevoss they all pulled off rather impressive performances.
Eisenberg really embodied Zuckerberg from the way he talked to mannerism’s he makes and to me a flawless performance, Garfield pulled off the role fairly well even though I really can’t see him as the next Spiderman! By watching some interviews with Sorkin Timberlake went to a tremendous effort to acquire the role of Sean Parker, audition after audition until basically Fincher couldn’t say no and I really do take my hat off to Armie Hammer who played pretty much a duel role as the ‘twins’ I honestly thought throughout the film there was actually two different actors! So he had twice the job of the others.
Throughout the film it shows Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) testifying in depositions with ‘flashbacks’ to the ‘incidents’ that occurred with the creation of Facebook and the people that may or may not have helped it along, its a thrilling story which does make you sit back and wonder how much is the truth and how much is ‘hollywoodised’, in a way Zuckerberg’s arrogance really did want me to see him fail miserably but in the end all I really wanted to do is give him a hug.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK is in Cinema’s on the 28th October. I give this film 4 out of 5 stars.