Vice and Virtue: The Social Network

Virtue: The Social Network (2010) is a thriller, a comedy, a legal drama, and a warning all rolled up into one star-studded, fast-paced, and ever-topical masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin’s electric dialogue is frenzying, gripping even those with less-than-suitable background knowledge or interest in coding, business, and law. The (aforementioned) star-studded cast, including Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake (what are you doing here?), and Armie Hammer, bring Sorkin’s words to life under the direction of the venerable David Fincher. Now, a film doesn’t deserve merit simply because the credits are straight from the front row of the Oscars. The Social Network is timelessly relevant. If only Eisenberg, or indeed Zuckerberg, could have known how far social media and the digital age would go. A rewatch of this movie today is chilling, as a glimpse into the young mind of a tech billionaire is more insightful now than ever.

If you, like I was, are skeptical of the genre and its appeal to you, trust that I was right there with you. Mere minutes into my begrudging screening, however, I was engrossed by Fincher’s gloomy Harvard halls and the genre-transcending themes of ambition and friendship. I suggest you give this film the chance that I (see: “less than suitable background knowledge”) did. Immerse yourself in the calculated delivery of Eisenberg’s lines, and the wrenching betrayal of legal depositions, and try to forget what Meta has turned into.

Vice: The Social Network (2010) is so overhyped. I haven’t wasted 2 hours of my time since I went to the Class of 2024’s graduation. If you haven’t seen it, let me recap it for you. Basically, “Mark Zuckerberg” gets dumped, makes a website where people rank women by attractiveness—problematic AF—then he's like how about I make this a billion-dollar website and piss off a bunch of people in the process? He then loses all his friends (not that there were that many to begin with) and gets sued a couple times. And the movie doesn’t even pass the Bechdel test, which I know is not a proper measure of a film’s representation of women, but there are literally two female characters and one is “Zuckerberg's” ex-girlfriend. If I wanted to watch a bunch of white guys sit on computers and yap I would major in computer science at Harvard. Even ChatGPT recognizes that this film is dialogue-heavy. 

And I’m not gonna use big words, like my aforementioned co-writer, to try to make this film seem smarter than it is, because it sucks. I haven’t even talked about the “star-studded” cast, including Armie “Cannibal” Hammer, Justin “DUI” Timberlake, and Jessie “Annoying Voice” Eisenberg. Andrew Garfield is chill though. But for the rest of this male-dominated cast, no thanks. I would rather watch a biographical drama on Elon Musk buying Twitter, having thirteen kids with different women, and somewhat secretly running the United States. I mean, that has to tell you how bad this movie is.