THIS REVIEW IS TAKEN FROM www.fucking-movies.co.uk WHERE IT CAN BE SEEN IN ITS INTENDED FORM.
***WARNING***
THE FOLLOWING REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS AND CONTRADICTIONS THEREFORE IT MAYBE UNSUITABLE FOR SOME FUCKS. IT ASLO TAKES THE ENTIRE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE OF COLLEGE AND PUTS IT ONLINE, MINUS THE HARD DRUG USE, EXCESSIVE SEX AND OBSESSION WITH SHIT PROG ROCK/INDIE MUSIC.
***YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED***
I, like the rest of the insignificant people that make up my world, detest facebook. It supplies the voyeur in me with more power than it should safely receive, makes me mad at people for nothing more than a simple status update and takes up way too much of my online browsing time. At this time I have 88 friends on my facebook profile and I can safely say that I actually know 18 of them. The remaining 70 are only there so I can nose into their private lives, take a snoop around and then leave again unnoticed safe in the knowledge that I am still better than they are (thats right Guy Keown, I’m talking about you). Besides this rather cheap form of entertainment and the odd occasion when it allows me to remain lazy and wall post rather than calling someone to ask if their free, facebook is pretty much a waste of mine and everybody else's time. So why the fuck did David Fincher (one of my favorite current directors) decide to make the film about it?
The short answer is, he didn’t.
‘The Social Network’ is about a bunch of unlikable rich kids who attend that famous university (or college) in America that hands out “fuck you” degrees to people who really don’t need any more encouragement. Of the mentioned unlikeables we have a pair of rowing twins who stomp around breaking door knobs and shouting at the top of their lungs in words that are clearly way to long for them to understand which is made obvious when the said words never contain ‘beef’ or ‘cake’. We have another rich kid who is so out of touch with the world that he sees absolutely no issue in spending almost twenty grand as a result of a five minute conversation. And one other total arse hole who gets dumped for being a dick head and as a result sets the wheels into motion that will eventually dumb the worlds population by removing us the need to meet new people for real and provide my voyeuristic alter ego (Raymond the Wonder Roll) with the tools he needs in order to sniff around ex-girlfriends and the dudes she has banged since. That arse hole, in case you couldn’t work it out, is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of facebook.
As I said the film is about a bunch of unlikeables which makes ‘The Social Network’ a seemingly hard film to enjoy. Every character is played realistically, which means I was always going to enjoy their company as much as I enjoy Meryl Streeps face which itself resembles an old sandwich bag filled with bacon bits and left to go rotten before being beaten with a welsh midgets erectile disfunction. The film itself joyfully skips from one appalling moment to the next while interspersing an equally distressing legal battle set a few years after the main story. What is odd though is that despite the film dripping with the last decades bile it still manages to hold your attention and sustain your interest for almost two hours. The script is incredibly well written, its completely dialogue driven with the exception of that one scene where Zuckerberg gets ten of his mates to rob three of Las Vegas’s largest casinos which struck me as quite an odd plot development, but the Albanian bloke I bought the DVD from insisted that that’s pretty much how it all went down so I went along with it.
The actors contained within are all pretty much spot on in terms of their portrayal of the characterizations of the real people whom most of the story is based. Jesse Eisenberg pulls off a role that finally convinced me he wasn’t actually Michael Cera in a bad mask. You believe that his Zuckerberg could actually make the decisions he inevitably does and in rather a brave step leaves the character with almost no good sides what so ever. Timberlake is turning out pretty well also portraying Napster co creator Sean Parker. My favorite Fincher puppet in ‘The Social Network’ however has to be Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin. Eduardo’s story in the film takes him through a massive array of complex emotions. From happy and drunk to hurt and betrayed to angry and vengeful, the part is truly played almost to perfection and despite the character still being a unlikeable swine I did find myself begrudgingly feeling sympathetic towards him when Zuckerberg performs the dirty facebook sanchez on him mid way through.
Fincher’s direction is as always amazing. The actors all giving perfect readings across the board and the story moves at a comfy pace while remaining entertaining something quite astonishing considering how little I cared about the story itself.
By the end of ‘The Social Network’ I was a mixed bag. On one hand I had been entertained and impressed by what I had seen, on the other hand I was wondering why I bothered watching it. At the end of the day ‘The Social Network’ is still a movie about the people who created facebook, a topic still too current and still totally irrelevant in terms of story telling. There really isn’t much of a story to tell which is party why the film is so good in terms of holding your attention. The film, somehow is a contradiction of itself. I watched it and enjoyed it, then when I was done I thought I had wasted my time.
Its a tough one to rate, so I’m going to cheat!
The Social Network gets...
4 out of 5
and
2 out of 5
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