Director: David Fincher
Writers: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake
My one-paragraph take: The Social Network comprises of witty and fascinating storytelling, particularly due to the quick lines and the pacing of the settlements. At its heart, it’s a story of friendship and its fragility under the unenviable pressures of better connections and profit. The cinematography and the editing are brilliant and coherent. We really see this in action when the editing matches Zuckerberg’s frenzied programming talent when he cobbled together the Facebash.com. Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg was an intense, unrelenting performance, crafting a character that effectively courts both my contempt and sympathy in multiple successions. This was a portrait of Zuckerberg that isn’t out to vilify him, but shows his uninhibited determination to get what he wants, with the intellectual capacity and belligerence to see it to its end. He is the antihero par excellence of our decade. No one really leaves The Social Network with their initial reputations unscathed – Harvard University’s elitism perhaps the most irreconcilable negative portrayal of all – and perhaps that’s just the point.