The Social Network is riveting.
We’re talking the internet here, so The Social Network, an analysis of events that took place all of seven years ago, is an ancient history lesson. But it’s an illuminating, thoroughly engrossing one. Thrilling, too.
Fincher dissects the sprawling Facebook story with flair and precision. Zingy dialogue, technical verve and a magnetic turn from Eisenberg. Now let’s see QT tackle Twitter…
You may not particularly like the people involved, but the journey is everything here.
A rich, understated character drama that gleefully exposes the petty playground politics at the centre of one of the internet-era's most bitter court cases.
David Fincher's remarkable film...is the most entertaining and engrossing new media movie ever made - at least until we find out there's an order for an omerta killing going out in the backrooms of Twitter.
Coldly analysed as mise-en-scène, the film is almost nothing but scenes of people sitting over glowing screens, or in lawyers’ offices, or in bars/diners/clubs. Yet it never seems sedentary.
Storytelling of such finesse as to make most other Hollywood dramas this year look like comic strips.
If there’s a nit to be picked it’s that while many individual scenes are electrifying, the whole doesn’t quite equal the sum of its parts.
The film is an absorbing and persuasive dramatisation of what might have happened during a frenetic period of recent media history, but I must confess it's not the film I thought, or rather hoped, it would be.
Endlessly talked about, especially by the social demographic that makes up a big chunk of Facebook users, and tirelessly anatomised by cultural commentators, it has made cinema what it so rarely is these days: the centre of a public conversation.
It gets no better than this.
Sure to win friends and influence people.
The Social Network explores how a new generation has sought a similar illusion of connectivity through virtual means. It's not an attack on new media by any means, but it is an intelligent, gripping attempt to understand it.
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.
Pacy though it is, The Social Network turns out to be a thoughtful, almost old-fashioned film largely about people talking in rooms.
he Social Network takes familiar ideas about trust, friendship, endeavour, ambition, betrayal and greed into fascinating new areas of experience. It's as riveting, lucid and open-minded a film as Rashomon.
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General release. Check local listings for show times.
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