The saga of the creation of Facebook turns into a riveting thriller via director David Fincher. The Social Network contains a sharp screenplay by Aaron Sorkin with rapid-fire, smart dialogue, amazingly good acting, and stylish direction courtesy of David Fincher. Fincher tones down his MTV-style tricks of his Seven days while still adding gobs of style while Trent Reznor’s electronic score meshes perfectly to a post-modern film where revenge can be played out in cyberspace. I’m still not sold that facebook is such a great invention. I use facebook every day but sometimes wonder what our lives would be without it, and if our lives were better before it was invented. Facebook is addicting and meant to bring people together but to me, it adds to our sense of isolation and the movie is as important to this generation as any classic was to generations before mine. Facebook was created by a smarmy, hyper-intelligent jerk named Mark Zuckerberg (played as a quirky, arrogant mess of a human being by Jesse Eisenberg).

Eisenberg is never better than he is here, a lonely, vengeful nerd. If the film is to be believed, facebook was essentially created from a stolen idea and a drunken night of revenge blogging against a pretty girl who called Zuckerberg an asshole. She did this only after he insulted her class status and made fun of her education. Swell guy.

The Facebook Movie (as most people call it) goes into great detail using a flash-forward narrative structure to go back to both the creation of the website and to the present where Zuckerberg is being sued by his former best friend Eduardo (played by new Spider-man Andrew Garfield in a solid performance) and a pair of rich but clueless twin jocks who claim Mark stole their idea for facebook. The funniest scene in the movie is when the jocks go to the president of Harvard whining about how Mark ruined them and stole their idea because of a clause in the Harvard handbook. Mark is an easy character to hate and Eisenberg never once plays for sympathy with his scathing performance, but you do sense an inner humanity in Zuckerberg, that only once in a very long while bobs to the surface. Justin Timberlake also gives an amazingly assured performance as the founder of Napster and plays him as an arrogant pretty boy, drug-snorting possible pedophile……whats not to love there. The Facebook Movie is the movie of “right-now” for my generation, for better or worse, and one of the year’s best films.

Grade: A-

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