The Social Network: dislike
November 16, 2010Yesterday I went to see The Social Network toute seule. Entirely alone, in fact – I had the whole cinema to myself. FYI this post contains spoilers, so if you wish to see the film then I advise you to stop reading.
I found the film disappointing, as often happens when trailing the hyping masses to see a hotly anticipated film. I’d expected an upbeat, exciting, thrilling tale of Zuckerberg and pals, starting something massive in their dorm room. Instead I got a bleak mix of booze, betrayal, and some fairly depressing lawsuits. And Justin Timberlake as the super-confident Josh Lyman of the film injecting punchy mission statements and tacky glamour into the mix whilst mysteriously looking like a try-hard dad.
Facebook aims to make it easier to keep in touch with the people you care about, so it feels strange that the film is void of any warmth, and this lack of warmth is all pinned on Zuckerberg himself. Intentional or not, it feels a little too easy and contrived, and Zuckerberg’s character seems a little too robotic and one-sided. But perhaps I didn’t buy the screenplay generally – the break-up scene at the beginning of the film grabbed my attention, but it felt like an exchange between thirty or forty-somethings. I think in his bid to create a stinging volley of dialogue, Sorkin forgot to convey the characters as young people who are believable and emotionally clumsy. And that continued throughout the film.
A bit of navel-gazing never hurt any blogger, and as the film’s protagonist and I are roughly the same age, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Zuckerberg’s study environment in Harvard circa 2003 and my own of the same year. Fireplaces, a proper college-wide network and signature Sorkin-speed speech were the main differences. To contrast, I was inventing cooking dances to keep warm in the kitchen, (still) struggling with dial-up internet (I think we first got 128k broadband in 2004) and being quietly socially inept.
If the film doesn’t work in itself as entertainment (for me at least), it certainly doles out good advice to budding entrepreneurs (better than Alan Sugar’s Apprentice, that’s for sure): don’t be dumb about IP, be prepared to sacrifice your friends, cover your back and get a good lawyer.
