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This week, I went to see The Social Network, a film about the founding of the social networking website, Facebook, which was created by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in February of 2004. The film was based off Ben Mezrich’s 2009 nonfiction book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” in which Eduardo Saverin was a consultant.
The film takes us through Mark Zuckerberg’s life in the weeks prior to and following the launching of Facebook. At the time of the launching, Zuckerberg is a sophomore at Harvard University and Saverin is his best friend. The movies tells the story through the eyes of both Zuckerberg and Saverin as Zuckerberg addresses the two lawsuits that have been made against him. One lawsuit examines whether or not Zuckerberg stole the idea from two other Harvard University students, while the other examines the lawsuit Saverin makes against his former best friend.
I was excited to learn that Aaron Sorkin was the writer for this movie because I had learned about his experience on The West Wing in a class. I enjoyed the sassy and bitter attitude of Zuckerberg during the hearings, while his life in college clearly showed his low social standing and desire for recognition and popularity. While I thought the ending scene was rather abrupt, it was the perfect way to show how the success that Zuckerberg had achieved still did not make him happy.
Although I enjoyed the film in terms of editing and, especially, how characters were introduced (for example, Justin Timberlake’s character said his name to a girl he’d just slept with, and she asked him jokingly if he was the inventor of Napster, which he was), there was one very stylized scene that took me out of the entire film. The two boys accusing Zuckerberg of stealing the idea of Facebook from them were participating in a crew competition in the UK. They lost by a few seconds and, to make matters worse, they discovered that Facebook had gone international. I understand why the competition was shot, but it was heavily stylized in slow motion with intensely dramatic music. This scene was so drastically different from the rest of the movie that I completely separated it from the story. I felt like the scene was made to impress the audience, but it brought me out of the world of the film and it took me awhile to get back into it because all I could think about was the race.
I enjoyed this movie and would recommend it to anyone who has wondered about the Facebook phenomenon, but, especially, to those who have their own Facebook accounts. As someone who was invited to Facebook in 2004, when it had just become open to high school students, it was truly interesting to see what was actually developing ,while I flipped lazily through various Facebook profiles.
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