Yes! Not even because I was the only person in the theatre and the ticket was $4.68, the least I have ever spent on a movie ticket.
The Social Network stars Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Andrew Garfield as co-founder and friend Eduardo Saverin; and Justin Timberlake as nappy-haired Napster founder Sean Parker.
Mark Zuckerberg is a student at Harvard who is portrayed as a cold-hearted rational. Mark insults his girlfriend for having a non-elitist education and she responds with, "you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." She breaks-up with him, and this spurs Mark to blog about her in a drunken rage (hilariously on livejournal.com, the emo-diary of the early 2000s). This then inspires Mark to create FaceMash.com, a college version of Who'd You Rather?, where two college girls' pictures are presented side-by-side and everyone on campus can vote on who's more attractive. After receiving 22,000 hits in the first four-hours that it was online, a course of events take place that ultimately results in Facebook as we know it today.
What impressed me the most about this movie was that it's a movie about social networks themselves, minus the internet. It deals with love and loss, but also the little details of fate. If one person didn't say one trivial little thing, Facebook would be nowhere. For example, when Eduardo asks Mark if one of the girls in his class is single, Mark says that chicks don't just walk around with a sign that advertises their relationship status. This sparks one of the nuclei of Facebook: the "relationship status" and "interested in" profile feature. The Facebook code itself, in a sense, is entirely constructed of micro-social networks.
Even though Mark Zuckerberg was not particularly portrayed in a positive light, neither was anyone else. There was no one who I felt that I could really side with. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is portrayed as an asshole throughout the movie, but he's actually quite sensitive. I think when his girlfriend left him he was terrifically lonely. There's always mention throughout the movie about his isolation and the fact that he has very few friends. I think of a lot of the Facebook foundation (in this movie) was Mark trying to come to mathematical terms with socialization because he felt so isolated. Basically when his best-friend Eduardo gives him the algorithm for calculating a winner on FaceMash, it's metaphorical of all the formulas that Mark puts into Facebook that are representative of calculating social culture.
As for the other characters, Sean Parker, the Napster founder who was sued bankrupt but changed the face of music, was portrayed as a massive douche. But he gave Facebook some of the fundamentals, such as taking out "the" when Facebook was originally called, "thefacebook.com" and getting Mark money and California-bound. Eduardo should have read through his documents but he was the most sympathetic character in the movie. TheWinklevoss twins should not have given their grand idea to a coder when they couldn't code themselves. So the question is, how much ownership over what goes into the social code can anyone really have? If I inspire someone, can I claim partial ownership?
Mark Zuckerberg says in the "PR Post" blog (http://prpost.wordpress.com/) that the movie was just, "fun." He also characterizes the movie as fictional. Which makes sense, because if Erica Albright broke up with Mark and he immediately went home to create FaceMash, wouldn't she be entitled to $1 billion because she broke-up with him and inspired the ideas that created Facebook in the first place? Doesn't add up to me. Mark Zuckerberg himself says he knows that his life isn't that entertaining or dramatic, which makes sense, because I dated a computer coder for four years and they really are exactly the way Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed: seemingly emotionless, insanely smart, deeply sensitive, and completely devoid of entertainment value. But, regardless, I guarantee that Facebook hits went up 700% so that people could update their status to say that they had just seen The Social Network.
So while I think the events in The Social Network were stretched for dramatic purposes, it shows some good business lessons and maybe proves that there are algorithms that can calculate human relationships. I never thought so, but considering the fact that Facebook is so wildly popular that they made a movie about it, there must be some truth to it.
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