Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Brenda Song, Rashida Jones, Joseph Mazzello, Rooney Mara, Dustin Fitzsimons
Directed by David Fincher
Expectations: None. It’s the Facebook movie.
If you’ve heard the hype surrounding The Social Network, and I don’t know how you would have avoided it, you will have heard that this is the movie of a generation. I can’t really argue against the sentiment of the statement as the film could easily be seen as such if you were so inclined, but I can wish that the movie of the generation was at least a little more substantial.
Yes, I said substantial. The main character here, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a one-dimensional immature caricature of a human and Jesse Eisenberg plays the character to a T. Eisenberg does a great job of making Zuckerberg look like a man devoid of any emotional response other than petty retaliation that he seems to unleash only incidentally in his quiet desire for acceptance from a girl. It works for the sake of the story Aaron Sorkin wanted to tell, but it does so at the mercy of the audience’s interest in the main character of the film, as he features no arc to speak of.
Much has been said of Aaron Sorkin’s writing on The Social Network and overall his work is good. It doesn’t dumb down a lot of the Internet jargon, which was fairly impressive and something I don’t think I’ve ever seen outside of a tech documentary. Computer technology is always a laughable part of fiction films with ridiculous programs created for the film breaking the illusion for anyone that knows or uses a computer regularly. Sorkin’s script doesn’t do that, so I must give him credit for that, but his relentless, rapid-fire dialogue gets old just as fast as the character’s can shoot it out of their mouths. If there was ever a definitive “talking heads” movie, this is it. No shit, in Scene 1 alone there’s gotta be more dialogue than the first thirty minutes of most films. I was exhausted and it just started! There are some genuine golden moments of dialogue throughout though, and it’s impressive for the simple fact that Sorkin was able to make an uninteresting story interesting.
The score of the film was composed by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross and is by far my favorite part of the film. Specifically the music over the opening titles skillfully moves from melancholy melodic piano to haunting, brooding synth, foreshadowing the themes to come. My only complaint about the score is the choice to synth out Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King and put it over the rowing race. It made the whole scene really comical to me, which seemed out-of-place and unneeded. Although, the twin brothers who are on the rowing team were a big source of laughs throughout for me (unintentionally?), reminding me of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, so perhaps the rowing scene was meant to be funny.
I did like the ending though, even though it’s completely ridiculous. Oh look, he’s got all that money, all that genius for programming, and in the end he’s just like us, on Facebook searching for approval. Yay! Movie of the generation! The Social Network isn’t a bad film, but it’s far from great. If nothing else, the film is pretty easy to get into discussions about, so I will give it credit for that and for not treating the audience like they’re stupid, but the computer-generated breath coming out of their mouths I cannot condone.