The Social Network

I feel as if I were just pounded relentlessly on the head with the clever-dialogue hammer. So Zuckerberg is intelligent enough to see through the obvious bull shit of everyone surrounding him, and enough of a brave social outcast to speak truthfully about it regardless of the consequences... well jeez. I guess that's all it takes to make a hero these days.

I was reminded, watching this film, of Card's work "Speaker for the Dead," in which he presented a similar type of hero, but with such profound depth and genuine meaning weaved perfectly throughout his championing of the truth that in comparison, Zuckerberg comes off as nothing more than a lifeless imitation.

So I asked myself, if Zuckerberg isn't actually that incredible of a character, what is is that makes so many people sing the praises to this film? I would have to say I think it is the second lead character, and I'm not talking about Olsen. I'm talking about The Facebook. The living, breathing, brainchild-entity lurking backstage waiting to be born, insisting throughout the film that it has the right to be born, that it is needed, that the world depends on it to exist as a modern society. I think it is empathy with that image that has drawn so many people to this film. It is that sense of urgency, of anxiety--what would life be like without The Facebook? This is why the audience cheers on Zuckerberg, more so than any other feature of his character. It isn't even that he is responsible for the creation of something we are addicted to. It's that he is responsible for recognizing the idea of that addiction, the idea that modern society needs increasingly sophisticated digitized interconnectivity, that our psyches have become dependent upon assimilation by others and constant validation of our integration.

Take all that away, and this movie is mediocre, which is precisely what I found it to be. I honestly can't believe that I heard some people say it was the best film of the decade.