The plot, in case you can't figure it out by now, is about the creators of Facebook, which is no doubt a household name. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as the main founder, Mark Zuckerberg and tells the story of it's inception in a Harvard dorm room and follows it to present day. Also rounding out the cast was Justin Timberlake and Rooney Mara.
I enjoyed how the plot was non-linear and brought us from future to past with ease. The plot was very informative and I think anyone would be able to write a very detailed paper on how Facebook was created, assuming that the mountain of facts thrown at your were in fact accurate. I was very worried there was going to be a love story involved and thankfully this wasn't so, more or less. I did a bit of research after the fact and found out that a lot of this is accurate, although most is conjecture at best but at least is in keeping with the general consensus on how things went down at that time. There were some subtle things changed for added suspense in the plot, but nothing became too erroneous. I felt it was more of a straight history with a hint of a message at the end about the age old money vs. friends conundrum. It was entertaining in the end though. The characters were believable and you could actually sympathize, for the most part, with each of the characters.
Trent Reznor did the score and it was pretty great. The movie overall was filmed adequately. There was a row boat race sequence which I particularly enjoyed with my favorite macro lenses and soft soundtrack and fast edits, but it was totally out of place with the rest of the movie and really didn't have any bearing on the plot. I'm not sure why it was kept in the movie? That sequence, taken out of the context of the rest of the movie, was quite beautiful.
Well Jesse Eisenberg was Jesse Eisenberg, once again. I have no idea if Mark Zuckerberg has the same persona as Eisenberg. I'm a fan of him, but I don't think everyone is. He didn't really do anything different than what we've seen in Adventureland or Zombieland, except he was a super genius in this film. It's not to say it was a bad job, it was just nothing new. Rooney Mara played a smaller role but apparently her performance was great enough for director David Fincher to cast her in the other movie he is working on, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. How that happened, I'm not sure. Her performance was fine, but enough to make me think she could pull off Lisbeth Salander? No. I think it's very interesting to note, as well as mind boggling, that two different actors were used to play the twins in the movie -- sort of. Fincher decided to use Armie Hammer for one of the twins and he did some split screen magic to have him play the other twin as well, but for the most part he computer generated Hammer's face onto another actor's (Josh Pence) body. They even made these actors go through a ten month twin boot camp to be able to mimic each other's body language. Okay, Seriously? What gives? Why in the world was all of that necessary? For goodness sakes, just use split screen or a different actor. That was a waste of time and effort in my opinion.
Overall, this was a fine and very informative movie. I think it's interesting to know how this generation defining website came into existence, but the movie could've been maybe 30 minutes shorter :). This movie had potential to be cinematic awesomeness, but didn't quite get there. It wasn't a bad movie, it just wasn't great. All in all, it's kept the top spot for two weeks in a row now and has brought in over $51 million worldwide is pretty good considering the budget was only $50 million. "A guy who makes a new chair doesn't owe money to anyone who's ever built a chair." -- The Social Network.
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