Movie : The Social Network
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara
After awesome movies like “Seven”, “The Game” and not forgetting “Fight Club”, David Fincher is back with a biopic of the founder of the famous social networking site Facebook.
Based on the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezerich, it's about how an arrogant and lonely Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) created Facebook, while a sophomore at Harvard.
Plot
Set in 2003, Zuckerberg, in frustration caused by his breakup with his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), creates a website called FaceMash to rate the attractiveness of women Harvard undergraduates. He does so by pulling an impressive feat of hacking into the databases and by using an algorithm supplied by his best friend Eduardo Saver (Andrew Garfield), creates an application where male students get to choose the most attractive girl out of the two photos of women at a time.
Though Zuckerberg is punished with six months of probation for this, the popularity of FaceMash brings him to the attention of Harvard's handsome rowing team constituting identical twins — Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) and their partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who appoint him as the programmer of their website, Harvard Connection.
But Mark is suddenly struck with an idea of creating a social networking website exclusively to Harvard students and shares it with his friend Eduardo and names it ‘The Facebook'.
Zuckerberg's idea impresses Eduardo, who helps him with $1000 to start the site and also distributes the link to his connections at the Phoenix club. Eventually he is promised the post of its CFO. The popularity and the growth gained by this website and its availability on several campuses brings Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster into Zuckerberg's life along with an impending break up with his best friend Eduardo.
Thus the whole film, without a spell of boredom, is a careful amalgam of scenes from the two lawsuits simultaneously filed against Zuckerberg — one by the Winklevoss twins and Narendra, who believe that he stole their idea and so sue him for intellectual property theft, and the other by his friend Eduard, who sues him for diluting his shares of the company.
Good and the bad
Perfect casting and surprisingly the best ever performance by Justin along with the BGM rendered by Trent Reznor and composer Atticus Ross is perfect for this movie, accentuating the feelings of the otherwise not-too-expressive characters. This film also has fiction mixed with the facts to keep it interesting, which I think showcases Zuckerberg in a negative light at few places.
Bottomline: Super movie; one that you will love it even if you are not tech savvy.
J. SOWMYA, III Year, St. Joseph's College of Engineering
