THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Directed by: David Fincher

Do you really need to have a legion of friends to create THE most popular social networking site?

According to this cautionary tale, you don't have to. For all we know, this film is a dramatization of the beginning of Facebook although the people and the law suit that happens is real. This is the anti-social tale of the genesis of social networking.

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) basically just some nerdy who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Then a combination of anger, feeling rejected, alcohol, blogging and programming ability gave birth to a website comparing woman in Harvard in terms of hotness with farm animals.

The website's traffic increased exponentially in matter of hours and attract the attention of Winkelvoss brothers (both twins acted by Armie Hammer), who wanted Zuckerberg to help them creating some Harvard social networking site. Here, Zuckerberg see a winning move and move ahead by delaying meeting with Winkelvoss brothers and move on with Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, our future Spider-Man) to create baby Facebook, Facemash and leave the Winkelvosses uninformed at all. By that he infuriated the rich twins and has to face reprisal.

Then comes Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) the Rasputin who whispers ideas into Zuckerberg's mind and the rest is history, especially the breakup of his friendship with Eduardo and how Facebook become the most popular social networking site in the world worth of US$25 billion.

Framing the story in the legal lawsuit in flash-forward and flash-backward, Fincher manages to creep the audience by showing his version of Mark Zuckerberg; a cold, heartless, smart, calculating person who has zero interest in human relationship at all, he even doesn't care on parties and beautiful girls. He doesn't even care on money, it seems that his driving force is because he broke up with his girl friend. To that we have to thank Zuckerberg's ex girlfriend for 'motivating' the nerdy guy from Harvard to revolutionize our life.

This is a cynical and cruel film about how a venture into the making of a website based on friendship ended up destroying friendship of the maker itself.

Loaded with fast pacing dialogs that shoots like a bullet from a Rambo movie, if English is not your mother tongue, you need to concentrate more. Is this a masterpiece? I don't know, time will tell but this is a good film that lingers in my mind hours after I watch it.