The Social Network

[philosoraptor42]

Social Network (2010)

I think this must be the new "Slumdog Millionaire". It's looking likely to win the Oscars and I've absolutely no idea why. It's about a bunch of horrible horrible people and most of the scenes take place in a legal setting, with people arguing over intellectual property rights. The people speak very fast and are very hard to understand, never mind empathise with. Interestingly, Mark Kermode's recent DVD review began as follows: "On paper, The Social Network (2010, Sony, 12) sounds like the most boring film imaginable; an allegedly true-life tale of unlikable chauvinist posh kids sitting around in darkened rooms arguing about copyright law and occasionally going online." And that's pretty much where he should have stopped writing....

Mark Kermode actually goes on to wax lyrical about what an acheivement it is that Fincher keeps our attention, considering the subject matter. The problem is, for me, he didn't. David Fincher certainly tries his hardest to "jazz up" what is simply a bunch of people on computers and then a load of arrogant idiots moaning about intellectual property rights, but there's only so much he can do. All credit must be given to Justin Timberlake, and actually to all the actors, for doing the best with what they were given to work with. I point out Timberlake in particular (and seriously, no one is more surprised than me) because he does a wonderful job as a manipulative bastard. In Social Network manipulative bastards are about the best you can really hope for and sadly most of the time the bastards are not so much manipulative as just plain obnoxious.

        
Writing deeply misogynistic computer programs is serious business!

One criticism I very nearly made, which would have been utterly unwarranted, was that Prince Albert shouldn't have an American accent. Actually it turns out that he should. Clearly there's been a lot of attention to detail in this movie, but sadly, I found none of it terribly interesting.  The only way I can imagine it could have been made more interesting is by changes to the writing. I know Aaron Sorkin has a lot of fans, but I'm afraid a bunch of people sitting in a room arguing about intellectual property ownership is not terribly interesting.

There were, however, a few scenes, epitomised by Justin Timblerlake's character in particular, where the movie focussed more on the dreams the protagonists had of what they wanted to do with their internet business. In these scenes the movie gives us an idea of what it was they really thought they were trying to achieve along with the fact that in some sense they actually were acheiving it. On top of that we have the weird situation where they were all basically still at university while this was going on. The thing is that there didn't seem to be any way of getting around the fact that all the main players were utter bastards. While I recognise Sorkin needs to have some credit for not simply writing them as if they were all lovely people, there needed to be some reason to care about the events in the movie - and there simply wasn't any.

                       
This scene (so as to be realistic?) has the nightclub music almost too loud to make
out the ridiculous double-paced Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Why? I'm guessing it's so that
people don't leave the movie thinking that Justin Timberlake was the only good thing in it.

I'm just going to quickly focus on a few scenes which puzzled me. Firstly, the opening section where, while Mark Zuckerburg is doing computery stuff, there is a university party going on. In the party girls seem to be expected to degrade themselves in order to remain included in the party. Is that a realistic depiction of American universities? (We don't have "fraternities" or "sororities" in the UK, so it's hard for me to be sure.) If it's realistic then my question is, why are we being shown this? What is it supposed to tell us? On the other hand, I've read that Aaron Sorkin wanted it to depict Zuckerburg's fantasies about what might be happening at those kinds of parties. If so, it would have made sense to make that a little clearer within the movie. Perhaps the idea was simply to show that both the fraternity rich kids and the computer geeks were equally disgustingly misogynist. That's the main message I was getting from it.

Another scene which puzzled me was the rowing race in England with Hall Of The Mountain King remixed in the background. Why did that take so long and what was point of it? Was it just filler?


Oh and why do Fincher's movies all seem to take place in a yellow version of The Matrix?

Whether you like Social Network or not, I didn't really feel it was deserving of awards. It's hard for me to ignore how soul-destroying it was to watch these obnoxious and boring misogynistic arseholes argue about their website issues. I can't say this was worse than average, I just really do not get the appeal.

3/5 (Oh my goodness, I am being so overly kind to this movie I can't quite believe it. I guess even I'm affected by the stupid levels of hype this movie has received.)