
The structure of The Social Network is a legal deposition in the present, with flashbacks showing what happened in the past. According to the movie, Facebook started with a breakup. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is a student at Harvard who, in the opening scene, shows himself to be brilliant, successful, antisocial, sarcastic, and condescending. This gets him dumped by his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), which leads to Mark getting drunk and, with the help of his friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), hacking several Harvard sites and making a website ("Facemash") where people vote on which of two Harvard women are hotter. This website gets so much traffic that Harvard's server crashes.

Their devil is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, using his celebrity experience to the hilt). Sean is a rock star of the online and business world, as the creater of Napster. He's also crashed and burned two businesses, is being sued by millions, and describes himself as broke. He also pushes Mark to move out to California -- and attracts the animosity of Eduardo.

Jesse Eisenberg played a slightly awkward but lovable nerd in Zombieland; he does a 180-degree turn for The Social Network, making Mark Zuckerberg a nerd and awkward -- but obnoxious and pretty unlikeable. The rest of the cast is very good (again, kudos to Justin Timberlake as the charismatic, dangerous celebrity to these Facebook founders). It may a little simplistic that Facebook is ultimately all about the woman who got away, but The Social Network is an interesting, fast-based and absorbing drama.
Overall grade: A
Reviewed by James Lynch
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