Many people have expressed the frustratingly short-sighted preconception of “a filum about Facebook?… That sounds shoite!”. First and foremost, this is not a movie about Facebook. It’s a movie about Mark Zuckerberg, now the world’s youngest billionaire. But more than that it’s a movie about societal structure, the birth of social networking, desperate ambition, algorithms written on dorm windows, loyalty, betrayal, greed and avarice, oh and fucking.
Fincher has once again wrought a near-perfect piece of celluloid that takes a piece of the zeitgeist and moulds it into two hours of sheer joyous entertainment. Everything about it makes you smile and grimace in ecstasy.
The casting is fantastic. Jessie Eisenberg plays the asshole/awesome nerd with a subtlety and sharpness that is thrilling. Justin Timberlake will kick your balls in with his mega-performance. The golden treasure of the cast though has to be Armie Hammer and 3/4 of Josh Pence who play the Winklevoss twins. (Hammer’s face was superimposed onto Pence’s skull, another example of Fincher’s flawless and invisible digital effects work, I really thought they were proper twins). The twins are the pinnacle of the Harvard elite, rowing jocks with sexy hair, and Mark’s accusers in an intellectual property lawsuit. These two are wildly entertaining and are responsible for some of the film’s biggest laugh out loud moments.
Make no mistake, this film is very funny in places. Dark and funny. But more than that it’s just shit-cool. Trent Reznor’s score weaves the scenes together like a digital sex-snake. The desaturated picture, shot on the RED camera, fits the tone and feel of the film perfectly.
The best thing about this film, however, is it clarifies in your mind why Facebook is so popular. It basically allows you to creep and lurk, to be a digital voyeur. What’s key though is that the people you’re checking out are the people you know, or the people you’d like to know. The scene where Mark comes up with the idea of the ‘Relationship Status’ feature is pure genius. Everyone wants to know if someone’s available or not. What Zuckerberg did was to take the college experience of trying to fuck and put it online. Is it any wonder it’s become as big as it is?
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by Kevin Jay.
