The Social Network (or, as it is known around the world, That Facebook Movie) was directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin and stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella and Justin Timberlake.

Plot:
When Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Harvard-student Mark (Jesse Eisenberg), he goes home, gets drunk and programs a website where you can compare the hotness of two (female) Harvard students. This gets him into trouble, but he also gets a bit of fame out of it. Shortly afterwards he is approached by his co-students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) who are planning to build a dating site, Harvard Connection and ask for his programming help. Mark agrees but instead starts to build his own social networking site: The Facebook.

The movie is fantastically written, wonderfully acted and perfectly directed. While the guys involved yould have made a little more effort to include women who are actual characters, everything else is just as it should be and makes for an engrossing movie.

There were two things that impressed me most about The Social Network. One was the writing. The dialogues were great, it was funnier than you’d expect (even if the best joke [“I’m 6 foot 5, 220 pounds and there’s two of me!”] turned out not to be true). The structure which embedded everything in the two lawsuits worked really well. It made me think that I should give West Wing another try even though the show itself doesn’t interest me at all.

The other thing was the cast. Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark as basically a rather functional sociopath who really has no idea why people react the way they do to him, was pitch-perfect. Andrew Garfield was great, as was Justin Timberlake who managed to portray Sean’s bipolar disorder with dead accuracy. [I’m not saying that the actual Mark Zuckerberg and the actual Sean Parker are sociopaths or have bipolar disorder, respectively. But it’s the way they were written in the script.]

David Fincher’s part was less impressive, but not because it wasn’t good – it was! – more because I knew that I could expect great things from him and I got what I expected. Though I think it was the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that gave the movie its atmosphere. [Unfortunately the great Creep version from the trailer was missing.]

The only thing that really remains to be criticized is the depiction of women in the film. I mean, I realize that there’s apparently no female main character in this story in real life (not that Sorkin took that much caution with reality to begin with. Which I don’t mind), but of the three bigger female roles, one is a psychopath, one a motivational plot device and one an advice dispenser. Could have gone better.

Not that there’s a way around this movie anymore, but you really should see it.