The Social Network (2010) Trailer On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a. Download The Social Network (2010) Full Movie on CooLMoviez - Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook, but is later sued by two brothers who claimed he stole their idea, and the cofounder who was later squeezed out of the business.
From the first sentence, the first word, the first nervily in-drawn breath, this compulsively watchable picture announces itself as the unmistakable work of Aaron Sorkin. His whip-smart, mile-a-minute dialogue made The West Wing deeply addictive on TV, and after uncertain works such as Charlie Wilson's War and the strange, small-screen drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – in which Sorkin's distinctive, faintly martyred seriousness was bafflingly applied to the backstage shenanigans of a fictional television comedy – this writer is triumphantly back on form. He's found an almost perfect subject: the creation of the networking website Facebook, and the backstabbing legal row among the various nerds, geeks, brainiacs and maniacs about who gets the credit and the cash.
Part boardroom drama, part conspiracy thriller, the story is adapted from Ben Mezrich's non-fiction The Accidental Billionaires. There appears, however, to be nothing accidental about it. The film version perfectly displays Sorkin's gift for creating instantly believable sympathetic-yet-irritating characters, and the chief of these is Facebook's driving force, Mark Zuckerberg, played with exemplary intuition by Jesse Eisenberg. He is a borderline sociopath, never smiling, never raising his voice, never conceding an argument, driven to create his masterpiece through the unforgettable pain of being dumped in the movie's opening scene. What perfect casting Eisenberg is. (I couldn't help remembering, incidentally, his character's disparagement of Facebook in the movie Zombieland: jeering at idiots with status updates like: 'Limbering up for the weekend.') Sorkin gives everyone great lines. It's pretty much a non-stop fusillade of put-downs, insights and zingers. I wonder if the real-life Zuckerberg has ever physically said as many words as this in his entire life.
David Fincher's direction creates just the right intensity and claustrophobia for a story that takes place largely in a stupefyingly male environment at Harvard University in 2003, shown in flashback from various acrimonious legal proceedings. Here, computer-science student Zuckerberg has the same sense of entitlement and self-congratulation as everyone else, but combined with social resentment about being barred from snobby fraternities and clubs. When his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with him, the director shows how the emotionally wounded Zuckerberg embarks on a retaliatory campaign not far from the sinister world of Fincher's serial-killer films Se7en and Zodiac. He blogs vengefully about Erica and, in an evil-genius frenzy, creates Facemash, a spiteful and misogynistic site that invites the guys to rate campus girls against each other. (Slightly leniently, the movie explains it away a little by emphasising that Zuckerberg has had a couple of beers.) It is from this beginning that the smilier, friendlier Facebook emerges. But we have been cleverly shown the site's nastier, more paranoid origins: a clue to its unspoken world of friend-number envy, cyber-stalking and anxiety about having no friends at all.
Zuckerberg gets investment from fellow geek Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, of whose marginally superior social success he is jealous and whom he later betrays by cutting him out of the action in favour of web entrepreneur Sean Parker, smoothly played by Justin Timberlake. Wealthy alpha-male twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) plan to launch their own site, called The Harvard Connection, and try to recruit Mark as their tame techie-nerd; initially dazzled by their cachet, Zuckerberg plays them along, fatally delaying their launch while secretly getting his own up and running. Shrewdly, Sorkin and Fincher show how the Winklevosses are afraid to sue, because that's not the action of an effortlessly superior Harvard man.
Probably conceived when Facebook was at the top of the heap, the movie now arrives in cinemas at a time when Twitter has overtaken it in zeitgeisty importance: a lesson in how fast-moving internet trends can be. It would be great to see a movie about an ageing Australian-American media mogul trying to stay with-it and hip by tragically investing in MySpace – what tremendous scenes of rage-filled incomprehension there could be as the great man rants in front of downward-trending graphs. Or perhaps a Made in Dagenham-type British comedy about that once whiter-than-white-hot phenomenon Friends Reunited, run by a blameless couple in a spare room of their Barnet home: a dark destroyer of marriages, a reopener of school-day wounds, far more toxic than Facebook could ever be.
The success of The Social Network lies in capturing the fever of Facebook's startup, while subversively implying that it created money and ephemeral buzz, but not a whole lot else; there is very little about the interconnectivity and creativity that its evangelisers often claim. With its fanatical rivalry, envy and preeningly clever half-wits butting heads, the film reminded me a little of the BBC's excellent TV play Life Story from 1987, the story of Francis Crick and James Watson and their ill-tempered race to discover the structure of DNA before anyone else. (Sam Mendes and Pippa Harris are reportedly developing a remake.) Yet that was a story with something substantial at its close. This has … well, what? At the end, all is loneliness. This is an exhilaratingly hyperactive, hyperventilating portrait of an age when Web 2.0 became sexier and more important than politics, art, books – everything. Sorkin and Fincher combine the excitement with a dark, insistent kind of pessimism. Smart work.
On the surface, The Social Network is the story of Facebook — a website created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 that has redefined how we connect and communicate in the 21st century. At its core, the film is much, much more than just the story of one website. It is both a micro and macro look at success, failure and the trappings of ego and greed.
The film is ostensibly based on real people and real events. That said, many of the proceedings and characters were invented for the screen. In the coming weeks, there will be a flurry of discussion regarding just how accurate or inaccurate the film is with regard to Facebook's first year. Ultimately, these differences and inaccuracies are irrelevant.
For better or for worse, the cinematic version of 'the Facebook story' will be what becomes the lore surrounding the company, much as The Pirates of Silicon Valley has become the unofficial history of Microsoft and Apple for a generation of users. From a cinematic perspective, The Social Network is no more or less effective based on its factual accuracy. This is a fictional narrative, not a documentary.
Warning: The following review contains spoilers
The film opens with one of its strongest scenes, a five-minute interchange between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend. Zuckerberg, brilliantly portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, speaks a mile a minute, quickly moving from one topic to the next, leaving his companion to exclaim, 'Dating you is like dating a StairMaster.'
Throughout the course of the conversation, an acutely unaware Zuckerberg proceeds to insult his girlfriend, belittling her background, intellect and future life prospects. Having had enough, she ends the relationship and tells him off. The dialogue in this scene is a joy for Aaron Sorkin fans, reminiscent of the best interactions and moments on The West Wing or Sports Night.
This scene, one of the most significant additions that Sorkin made to the script — which is loosely based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires — introduces the audience to Mark, a man who is clearly brilliant, but who is also deeply insecure, awkward and more than a bit antisocial.
It also sets up the motive behind the project that would become the precursor to Facebook, Facemash. With Facemash, a Hot or Not for female students at Harvard (and a post-breakup lashing-out against womankind), Mark brings down the university network, gets in some trouble with the administration and makes himself an outcast on campus. It also brings him to attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two good-looking, athletic and privileged twins.
The Winklevosses (both played by Armie Hammer) and their friend, Divya Narendra, are looking to build a social dating site for Harvard men. They want Mark to work on the code. He readily agrees.
The dating site spawns a much bigger idea in Mark's head — and that idea is Facebook. Partnering with his best friend and financier Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, Mark builds The Facebook. What follows is an almost viral spread of user adoption and rapid growth and expansion.
To those of us who joined Facebook in those early days (I believe I joined in January 2005), the sequences demonstrating the takeoff of the service will resonate. One of the most interesting things about Facebook, a site that first built its allure and prestige based on its exclusivity (the need to have a *.edu e-mail address from a supported school and an invite from another user), was just how quickly it spread. Much like YouTube, which launched about a year later, Facebook went from not existing to being everywhere, seemingly overnight.
As Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg is brilliant. I fully expect to see his name on the shortlist for Best Actor nominees when award season ramps up. He manages to make Zuckerberg sympathetic but not pathetic — there's actually a nuanced difference. The character could have easily been portrayed as a pathetic, socially inept genius. Eisenberg doesn't do that. He manages to play a three-dimensional character, even though the last five minutes of the film are the only times we ever see a mournful side. His speech patterns, his eye movements, the way that he walks and moves his body — it's truly one of the best performances of 2010.
As the story progresses, the film's focus and point of view shift. Many of these shifts take place in a more present-day setting, where Zuckerberg, Saverin and the Winklevoss twins give depositions and testimony in some of the various lawsuits filed over the ownership and business dealings of Facebook.
Much like Fincher's 2007 film, Zodiac,The Social Network makes use of these court proceedings and depositions to build out the narrative. Structurally, this is an interesting device and one that is well-suited for this particular story. Fincher cuts quickly from scene to scene, various depositions overlapping, and testimony leads to flashbacks told from the perspective of the deposed.
As a director, Fincher is known for using subtle colors and hues in his work — from Fight Club to Benjamin Button, color is one of the most visually defining characteristics of Fincher's work. In The Social Network, he uses slight color variations for each character's perspective. It's subtle but it has an influence on the energy that takes place on the screen.
The second and third act of the film primarily involve the massive ascent of Facebook and the parallel breakdown between best friends Mark and Eduardo. As Eduardo Saverin, Andrew Garfield is particularly good at gaining our sympathies. He's the most relatable character in the film, but that isn't to say he's the hero. On the contrary, while the film makes it easy to empathize with his position — being cut out of one of the biggest companies founded this decade — it equally makes it clear that if Eduardo Saverin had run the business end of Facebook, Facebook wouldn't be anything close to what it is today.
Spb file viewer free download. Not all the credit should go to Zuckerberg, however. Napster founder Sean Parker, portrayed by Justin Timberlake, was instrumental in making Facebook the money-maker that it is today. Timberlake, a truly gifted performer, has a more middling track record as an actor. But in the role of Parker, a well-connected playboy who quickly assesses that Facebook is the next Napster (in a viral and culture changing sense), Timberlake is charming, boisterous and believable.
Timberlake is very good in the film, but still, his character seems like little more than a plot device. His primary function is to act as the catalyst to get Zuckerberg to go out to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004. This was the summer that Facebook really turned the page, and was on the brink of becoming huge. After that summer, Facebook was clearly on the path to runaway success.
The film ends almost abruptly, which is jarring, yet fitting for its subject matter. This is the story of the first year of Facebook. The momentum was building, but at the stage that the film ends, the site was still college-only, it didn't have apps and it hadn't toppled MySpace. In fact, this film ends where many others would start.
The undisputed facts regarding Facebook are that by May 2005, just over 15 months after thefacebook.com launched, the company already had 2.8 million registered users and had received its second round of funding for $13 million. In six years, the site has gone from being something meant to bring the college experience online to something that is quickly altering multiple forms of media and gaining more and more users from every corner of the globe.
Whether Facebook is the next Google or not, I'm not sure, but it has utterly encapsulated the zeitgeist of this era of computing and communications. Facebook's legacy and influence over the future is something that cannot be in disputed.
Watching the film, I was often struck by two things: First, how quickly it all moved. It's almost jarring to think that the majority of the major events in the film took place over the course of 18 months. Second, I was once again reminded of just how young everyone involved in the early days of Facebook really was.
I kept reflecting on these two points because I think they underscore the narrative. On its surface, this is a story about greed and ego and how money and fame change people. And that's all true. On the larger level, however, I think this is also a film about what happens when success literally happens overnight to individuals who haven't even completed the college experience. How does that not affect who you are? How does that not affect relationships and loyalties?
There is a cost for great success and a cost for changing the world. Oftentimes, those costs are paid in relationships. That's true for widget salesmen, and it's true for founders of social networks.
This underscores how adroit the tagline for the film really is: 'You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.'
Images courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment