As I write this, David Fincher's
The Social Network is almost sure to win the Oscar™ for Best Picture. So, I'm late to the party, but I just watched it for the first time the other night. I don't know; I don't think it was that good. It benefits from a decent Aaron Sorkin script, but I don't think the multiple depositions as a framing device worked well. I kept waiting for that to finish so we could get on with the story, which, of course, never happened. The framing device
was the story.
We're supposed to come away with the idea that Zuckerberg is kind of an asshole (or at least his ambition is to be one) but that he really doesn't have it in him because he's deep down, a nice guy. He just wants to be liked, which is why he invented Facebook in the first place. That's great, but I don't care and it doesn't make him interesting. It makes him dull.
The other thing we're supposed to understand is that Zuckerberg is at the forefront of a generation of tech geniuses who, unlike their forebears, don't just invent something great and then cash in, they stick with it and actually, you know,
run things.
"I'm the CEO, bitch"
Except that Bill Gates is still (effectively) running Microsoft, ditto Jobs at Apple, Bezos at Amazon... So there's not a whole lot special about Zuckerberg except that he's still really young.
The first fifteen or twenty minutes of
The Social Network are breathlessly good, but then the structure of the film starts to weigh it down like ankle weights, and it never recovers. Once it's over you feel unfulfilled, not because that it was a bad movie, just because there wasn't enough to it to satisfy.
