The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

The story of the founding of Facebook is largely told in retrospect from the present in which the founder is being sued by his former associates for reasons relating to issues of the ownership of the business, by then already worth billions.
With all the players from an episode of very recent history still around and no real dissent heard as to the film's veracity, it's difficult to view The Social Network as anything other than a jazzed-up documentary with the edges smoothed off and the usual elisions and compressions made for dramatic purposes. Nevertheless, it works efficiently enough as satire on the nature of corporate greed vs private dreams, with the precocious visionary Zuckerberg seen as being motivated by a surfeit of pride in his constructs rather than a lust for money, and the still points interspersed among the technobabble are surprisingly emotive in their bleakness. The casting is good, too: Jesse Eisenberg convinces as the lead, supercilious and yet easy to wound, and even Justin Timberlake fits, though largely by virtue of playing a gabbling asshole in the person of the Napster founder Sean Parker. If the characters remain unlikable and their preoccupations pathetically shallow, then Fincher can only be excused for having captured the essence of the phenomenon accurately.

6/10