I’m going to try my best not to hate on anything in this post. Here goes….
ALSO. SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE SOCIAL NETWORK.
The Dark Knight. Avatar. Inception. These movies were super hyped up before they came out. They were super hyped up when they came out. I try my best to avoid the hype. I don’t like going into movies with pre-conceived notions and opinions. So whenever these super hyped type movies come out I try to avoid watching any trailers, tv spots, interviews, reviews on the film. Whenever I watch movie trailers, I never watch them more than one time. Some stuff like word of mouth is unavoidable though.
So recently The Social Network came out. Everyone hyped it up after they saw it. Everyone on Facebook was adding Mark Zuckerberg on their “I Like” pages. Everyone on Twitter was raving about the movie. Anyone I know who saw it said it was amazing. It was tough to avoid the hype.
A month or so later I finally saw it. I tried my best to get into anti-hype mode. I went in thinking this movie will probably be decent, but that’s about it (I don’t trust other peoples taste in movies, no hate).
After just the first scene in the coffee shop, I realized I was really going to enjoy the movie. I loved how the dialogue was so fast in that scene. I really liked the frustrated-underdog-nerd-outcast vibe that Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg had going. As the film progressed I realized also I really liked the score for the film. It reminded me a lot of the Dust Brothers’ score for Fight Club.
Actually, I thought the film had a lot of parallels with Fight Club. First off, both films were directed David Fincher. Both films had a group of outcasted young men coming together to create their own exclusive club. Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker played a similar role to Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden in Fight Club, a sort of projection of of the main character’s ego. And following Sean Parker words of wisdom eventually led to his own downfall. Zuckerberg didn’t shoot himself in the mouth at the end of the film, but he did lose a ton of money and practically all his friends. Both films’ final scenes were inside a high rise commercial building. There’s a scene that involves a sort of hazing of potential Facebook employees that combines a drinking game with a race to who can code the fastest. It reminded me a lot of the underground fight scenes in Fight Club when new members would be thrown into a fight and the camera would pan over to shots of Tyler Durden looking back at Edward Norton’s character and vice-a-versa with a look of accomplishment in their faces. Both films had a lot “thieves in the night” scenes aka mischievous night scenes accompanied by a dirty/distorted electronica-type score: when FaceMash first went online; Zuckerberg and Saverin’s first encounter with Facebook groupies; the police bust down of the party Sean Parker was hosting near the end of the film. I guess I would say The Social Network is like a nerdy version of Fight Club.
I haven’t been watching too many new movies recently, but I’d definitely put The Social Network somewhere in my top 5 films of this year. It certainly lived up to the hype.