By Michael Moroney ’13
THE ROUNDUP
Just seven years ago, a couple of kids created the largest website on the Internet in a Harvard dorm room in an effort to meet some girls.
The movie “The Social Network,” based on the book “Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich, is the story of how Facebook was created and built and is now worth $33 billion and has more than 500 million members.
In theory, the movie should not work.
It is a series of scenes that jump forward and backward in time rapidly.
However, the two main time periods perfectly depict the conflicting types of relationships between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his partner/best friend Eduardo Saverin.
The plot follows basically the creation of Facebook: how Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, created it with Saverin’s money and they decided to keep it exclusive to Harvard.
As the website got wildly popular, they decided to expand to other colleges and eventually made it available to everyone.
In between these scenes, they showed conversations of two different depositions against Mark Zuckerberg, one from Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield, and another from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Throughout the story, these characters felt betrayed by Zuckerberg and that they deserved recognition, and lots of it.
Identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss were both played by Armie Hammer and in the first half of the movie they were the comedic relief and stole the show a bit.
Their witty banter, arguments and dislike for Zuckerberg provided some dry comedic relief.
Later on in the movie, Justin Timberlake depicted Saverin’s nemesis Sean Parker, who was a major player in the Internet world through Napster.
Timberlake’s wild partying and persuading speeches grasped the audience’s attention as a wild card that definitely weakened the friendship between Saverin and Zuckerberg.
At the box office, “The Social Network” grossed about $23 million on the first weekend, a mere fraction of the price put on Facebook.
The movie showed the other side of the Facebook story. It revealed the perspective from the people that were manipulated by Facebook founder Zuckerberg.
Overall, “The Social Network” deserves 4.5/5 stars and all it is definitely worth going to see in theatres for all Brophy students.
