Two hours in theater number 20 of Cinemark passed quickly and it left me wanting to know more about how a prank in a dorm room can turn into a multi-billion dollar corporation. Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation with his apparently untrackable one-time girlfriend Erica Albright shapes up the protagonist’s character that will remain for the rest of the movie. Self-indulgent but smart, a rational but not very socially savvy, a sympathetic but rude and insulting of a character in his heart-broken and drunken state of mind creates a democratic sexiness-o-meter web application that ends up flooding the Harvard University local area network with, what the movie claims to be, 22000 hits within a span of two hours at 4 am in the morning. The Harvard Crimson does not do any disservice by featuring an article on this Zuckerberg guy’s computer programming stunt. Wealthy Winklevoss brothers and their friend Divya Narendra, members of an exclusive Phoenix club, try to recruit Mark to assist them in their “Harvard Connection” project, which ends up pushing this nerdy kid to only speed up his own project with even more ideas that stirred up in his brain. Friendship with Eduardo Saverin gets trampled in the process of leveraging Sean Parker’s connections and ideas, while at the same time being swindled out of seven percent of the company by this negatively portrayed founder of music sharing application Napster. Parties, alcohol, and girls are portrayed as part of the American college experience to glamorize the movie to the targeted audience among other things. All in all, “The Social Network” is an enjoyable movie indeed.
Now the question arises on how important it is to keep the facts straight while providing entertainment, especially when the movie in question is supposed to depict people in real life and a culture that has become a global phenomenon. Ben Mezrich stuck to techniques that brought him success in his earlier book “Bringing Down the House.” It was later turned into a movie named “21,” which is supposed to be a real story about MIT students who travel to Las Vegas to con Casinos in their own game of blackjack. Mezrich’s style of fictionalizing and glamorizing reality is true in “The Accidental Billionaires” as well and this is the book that was adapted into a screenplay for “The Social Network.” Several non-existent characters and the fact that Ben Mezrich never had the opportunity to talk to Mark Zuckerberg himself and a few other prominent characters should make viewers skeptical of what is real and what is not.
