Directed by David Fincher
Late in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) was lamenting to his best (and probably only) friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) that the best opportunities and girls were so much more available to the wealthy elite students at their university – Harvard. Notorious for his lack of social skills, Mark was highly intelligent but his complete lack of empathy or even foresight in social situations continually got him in trouble. After his girlfriend informed him of some of his shortcomings, he went into a computer programming frenzy and constructed a website with photographs of all the female students at the university (by hacking into all the crudely protected data bases known as facebooks). The site invited users to vote for the ‘hottest’ females and was so popular that it crashed Harvard’s server in two hours.
As a result of this infamous, short-lived site, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) approached Zuckerberg to construct an exclusive dating website where Harvard students could meet others online. However, instead of working on their website and with the help of funds from Saverin, Zuckerberg began work on The Facebook which spread with viral magnitude. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) of Napster fame later suggested that he remove the ‘The’, but he also seemed influential in creating a rift between Zuckenberg and Saverin.
This fast-paced film relates to the origins of Facebook as Zuckerberg defends himself against prosecutions from the Winklelvoss brothers for allegedly stealing their idea and from Saverin for being frozen out of the expanding company and removed as the co-founder. At the end of the film, you have to feel sorry for the person responsible for constructing the biggest friendship website (550 million members in more than 200 countries) as he is left alone in a sterile boardroom, repeatedly hitting the ‘will you be my friend’ button on a computer.
Lezly Herbert
