After Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) gets dumped by his then girlfriend and gets up all sorts of craziness while drunk he’s also live blogging his efforts to create a website to degrade all women on campus.  He then creates a website FaceMash which allows you to compare all the women on the Harvard campus in hotness one at a time which eventually crashes the entire Harvard network.   This gets the attention of not only the school but also the fraternity, including The Phoenix Club.  Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) approach Zuckerberg with an idea for a Harvard University exclusive dating/social website.  Zuckerberg then goes on to create Facebook and the rest is what the call history.

The question that everyone had on their minds when this film was announced to be in production was, is this a story worth making a movie of?  The answer is unequivocally yes.  If you try to think of the development of the internet as a medium of information, then Mark Zuckerberg’s contribution to how we all view the internet and how we use the internet.  Today, there isn’t a TV show, movie, website, business, person who doesn’t have a Facebook page/profile/group/etc.

This film is about how Zuckerberg created the website, but it centres about the lawsuits that ensued late in the Facebook story.  We’re sitting in on all these meetings between lawyers and watch characters argue over point A and point B about who stole from who and with each thing argued over we’re thrown back to see what really happened.  While everyone can see where Zuckerberg definitely handled the business of how the Winklevoss’ idea definitely inspired him poorly, the tech in me also understands Zuckerberg’s point of view.  He was inspired by their conversation, but at the same time he cannot control where or how inspiration happens and therefore means that people like the Winklevoss’ are the kinds of people who had to get burned like this to learn the lesson of how they handle these ideas and not just throw them out in conversations with people that they don’t know.  As Zuckerberg said in the film “you don’t sue a carpenter for making a chair just because you also want to make a chair”.

Where the film becomes a general interest film for me is with the relationship between Zuckerberg and his only friend and co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).  When the idea first comes to him, Zuckerberg immediately finds Eduardo and tells him about and how he wants to involve him in it.  Eduardo is the business side to this tech friendly story.  Eduardo constantly watches the website grow and keeps harping on Mark to finally introducing the business plan that will finally make them a profit.  While time has shown to prove Zuckerberg right in how the business plan of Facebook should’ve been enacted, I imagine that if Zuckerberg had his way entirely up until today the website would still be completely commercial free.

As soon as the nagging from Eduardo starts to calm down and he sees that Mark is pretty much right about what Facebook is we then meet Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake).  Sean Parker is the guy who created Napster, that small program that allowed people to share music online for free.  Sean seeks out Mark and makes himself a part of the business that is Facebook.  The little ‘kind-of’ love triangle that is created here where Mark is trying to remain loyal to his first real friend, Eduardo, while at the same time finally being excited by his life with this project and the life that Sean is showing him is intriguing.

David Fincher definitely brought his style to the film in spades.  The film is dimmed into this cool green colouring that makes the film feel almost unreal.  I knew walking in that the film was based on the book The Accidental Billionaires which was an account of the creation of Facebook written by Ben Mezrich.  The book isn’t completely confirmed fact, even though Mezrich was consulted by cofounder Eduardo Saverin while writing it.  Since the story of Facebook is told through a long list of flashbacks that are queued up we can see how the green colouring that Fincher uses in all of these flashbacks acts as a marker for us the audience to realize that this is something being told from the perspective of the people involved in the settlement.  With the exception of the opening scene (which is also a flashback and filtered) everything obviously rooted in the settlement meetings.

Before we tune out I’d like to comment on the ramblings around the internet of the somewhat chauvinistic stance that the film has taken.  Many people around the internet have noticed how male-oriented the film is and doesn’t seem to have any ‘worthwhile’ female roles.  With the exclusion of Zuckerberg’s girlfriend who dumps him in the first scene of the film there isn’t a believably real female character.  Personally I don’t think that this is purposefully sexist, the story of Facebook is about how a guy – a fact – took an idea and created it.  If in fact all the men in the story turned out to not be very romantically involved or had any females in the team of people who helped to make this project happen isn’t sexist, it’s true.  Now if there’s a difference between reality and the film in relation to this topic is a completely different story, however in the context of this film there isn’t anything sexist about it.

This is a movie of the year at this point and I can’t help but remember how this movie left me buzzing with things I’d like to do as a web developer myself.  It’s a film that definitely represents a generation of online media and networking and how someone reinvented the way we all remain in contact and view the internet.  People don’t go on the internet to read articles anymore, they do so to experience something, and Facebook helped make that happen.

IMDB says 8.5/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 97%

I say 10/10