I remember when I first used Facebook. A college friend of mine, told me about it and I signed up for it thinking it was neat. At the time only college folks could use it since you needed a university email to get in. A few years later it blew MySpace out of the water and now it has changes the way we look at marketing in the business world. Did I think it was worthy of a movie? Not in the least.
In fact the previews made me wonder why I should care. The movie came out. Reviews came in. People seemed to love it. So I was curious. What makes this movie so damn good for people? Having just seen this movie I must say I still don’t quite get it. The story is acted well but it’s a mediocre story.
Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, gets dumped by his girlfriend for basically being a social loser. So he goes home to do what social losers do; savage her on the internet after a few drinks. He does this and creates a program with Eduardo Saverin, to compare the girls in school with one another. So this causes so much traffic it causes the servers at Harvard to crash. He gets a slap on the wrist for this but he also gets the attention of the Winklevoss twins.
They want him to create a site for them that will be an elite Harvard social sort of page idea. Zuckerberg agrees to do it. Then hooks up with his buddy Saverin, Saverin gives him funds and he gets to work creating Facebook. There are lots of cuts to Zuckerberg in court being sued by Saverin and the twins during this tale. There is a lot going on with the creation of the code, they get popular, they get groupies. Wow! Who knew nerds could be rockstars?
During the creation of Facebook at no time does Zuckerberg show any intention of making the social page for the Winklevoss brothers. In fact he kind of leads them on every time they want to meet with him he blows them off. Up until basically the day of the launch of Facebook he finally sends them an email saying he doesn’t think their site will work. So naturally when they see a huge site working he created they figure he stole their idea.
So through a twist of fate they get the attention of Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, he is played by Justin Timberlake. May sound crazy but it ain’t no lie baby…bye bye bye. Zurkerberg takes Parker’s advice on how to make a sweet cool company much to the chagrin of Saverin who is busting his butt to make deals. It makes the relationship tough. Eventually the company goes huge and Zuckerberg completely shanks his friend Saverin in the back by turning his percentage of stock into squat.
So it leads to the court case where you find out they will just settle. Zuckerberg is a billionare and what they want will be a drop in the bucket to him. The movie ends with Zuckerberg trying to friend that girl he was a d-bag to at the beginning of the movie while the Beatles “Baby you’re a rich man” plays in the background.
Who thought this would make good drama? The protagonist doesn’t learn anything from his actions. There is no rise and fall. Basically his brilliance made him rich and it got him out of his troubles. As much as I am not a fan of “Citizen Kane” because of the unlikeable protagonist at least it had a rise from nothing and realization at the end. It had catharsis. This movie lacks that and would have been better as a documentary.
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