When I first saw the trailer for The Social Network at a July screening of Inception, I paused for moment, then whispered to my friend, “I want that movie to be good, but I don’t think it will be.”

Why did I 1) want The Social Network to be good and 2) think that it wouldn’t be?

The answer to number one is: it’s a movie about Facebook.  The answer to number two is: it’s a movie about Facebook.

The former could potentially contain a wealth of commentary on the ascendant company and its enigmatic founder, the Internet, and society at large in the Information Age.

The latter could be shameless ploy for one of the world’s most shameless Internet companies.

Moreover, Facebook is something you just do, not discuss.  It’s a social faux-pas to say “Hey, thanks for the wall post!” in person.  Our online lives, though a poor substitute for our once-private lives, are not meant for the water cooler.  So to view Facebook on an enormous movie screen is simply—for lack of a more fitting word—weird, and unnervingly so.

Luckily, The Social Network is not just a Best Picture front-runner but one of the few perfect zeitgeist films of the past decade.

In case you were wondering by now, the movie revolves around the site’s founder, the tragicomic tech geek Mark Zuckerberg, and how his creation of Facebook altered the Internet and his own personal world.  When Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, writes the code—all of it, at first—for Facebook, three fellow Harvard students—twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer playing both) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella)—are alarmed that Zuckerberg has “stolen”

their idea.  A lawsuit ensues, and Zuckerberg’s former best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), begins another for being cheated out of his share of the company.  The story unfolds through testimony of the lawsuits’ depositions.

As an entirely truthful story, The Social Network is dubious. But as a film, it’s outstanding.

From the film’s opening gabfest, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue crackles with sharp wit and establishes Zuckerberg as an arrogant, clever loser who only wishes to join a prestigious Harvard final club–like a frat on steroids–because “they lead to a better life.”

No matter the deliverer, The Social Network’s lines provide cutting hilarity to an otherwise dark film.  The film’s dialogue is so good, in fact, that seemingly every reviewer in America has revealed all the best lines in his or her column.  But it only speaks to The Social Network’s power to dazzle an audience.

Of course, dialogue only goes so far.  From the marquee performances of Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake (!) as Napster founder Sean Parker to minor roles such as Douglas Urbanski’s portrayal of former Harvard President Larry Summers, the acting in the film truly brings the dialogue and the story alive.

The script isn’t all that’s golden.  I’d be neglectful not to mention The Social Network’s score, provided by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame.  Even when composing for the movie’s rowing race, Reznor provides a gloomy ambient sound that captures the dark side of the technology growing around us in the 21st century.  He has created the best OST since Jonny Greenwood’s 2007 release for There Will Be Blood.

Director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) has crafted a film that looks as good as it sounds.  The film’s setting is, for the most part, sleek and minimalist—not unlike Facebook, which Zuckerberg refuses to contaminate with ads (a major conflict between Zuck and Saverin in the film).  The viewer can’t help but admire Fincher’s thoroughness in aesthetics, as if his masterful direction of the actors wasn’t enough.

Though Fincher and Sorkin have hardly created a message movie, The Social Network wastes no time in smearing, well, everyone.  High society, Ivy League students, and the ever-consuming masses all go down.  In portraying the characters as arrogant, greedy, and petty, Fincher and Sorkin spare no one—except Eduardo Saverin.

And therein lies the film’s only major fault.

While the Winklevosses are stuck-up Harvard jocks and Sean Parker is a party-hardy paranoid, Saverin is merely a misguided innocent who was cheated out of his share of one of the Internet’s most popular companies.
As it turns out, The Social Network is based off Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidential Billionaires, for which Eduardo Saverin was the main consultant.  Of course Saverin looks so good; the tale is largely his side of the story.

Forgive me, but I doubt the former president of the Harvard Investment Association who raked in $300,000 in 2003 as a Harvard undergrad is an entirely innocent guy.  The point is, The Social Network would have been completely successful in its portrayal of the human condition had Saverin not been the “good guy.”

Nonetheless, The Social Network is monumental in its quality as a film; when the movie started to abruptly wind down, I started to wish that it wouldn’t end.  The movie engrosses the viewer; its reality was as difficult to shake off as the reality we create online.

Never mind that parts of this film were fictionalized for dramatic effect.  No matter how much of The Social Network is true, two things become terribly clear: 1) socializing in the 21st century was created by a boy with no social skills and 2) in the age of Facebook, we are not all becoming friends–but monsters.