Review of The Social Network (2010) by Anchovies — 19 Oct 2010

Technically well-made but shallow and unsatisfying. Fincher's flashback storytelling didn't make me feel like I was getting different perspectives and narrative layers. Rather, I felt like I was watching an intervention where everyone else could freely speak except the very person at the centre of the screen.

Instead of a balanced, well-rounded portrayal of the facts, the filmmakers dramatised the whiny testimonies of scorned 'victims' to depict a character so contorted and contrived he didn't look like a real human being.

Someone as aware of his brilliance as the on-screen Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't feel insecure enough to crave acceptance into a final club. His natural genius would set him apart enough and he wouldn't waste time garnering adulation from less intelligent people to affirm that.

The movie depicts the cinematic Mark Zuckerberg being so engrossed in creating revolutionary projects that he pays very little attention to social conventions and appearance. Yet the same acutely logical person wastes a chunk of the movie being envious that his friend Eduardo is more 'popular'.

To create a Shakespearean-like tragedy, Aaron Sorkin afflicted the protagonist with various 'fatal flaws' to amplify conflict. Facts were twisted to fit into the salacious story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

Real people were twisted to fit into the salacious characters the filmmakers wanted to show. The movie was nowhere as clever as it thought it was and by the end of the first scene you knew exactly what it was trying to say ('social misfit invents new way to socialise').

It's as if the filmmakers started the film with that message and then worked backwards, fitting real life people and events around that theme rather than use the truth. At its worst, TSN was slanderous non-fiction masquerading as entertainment.

At its best, it was entertaining fiction masquerading as fact....Either way for me it didn't live up to its hype.