The Social Network (2010)
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.