The Social Network

Deb 4 Me 2

Not the fault of the movie, but it was going for a few minutes before I realized it was the movie and not another preview of coming attractions. So the movie is running along and I notice it’s written by Aaron Sorkin; so I know two things, it will be well researched and it it’ll have a ton of dialog. It did not disappoint in this regard. A lot of verbiage, and I assume it was all correct in the context of computerese, which is a language I know little about. It made me realize how out of it I am in these times.

The text is punctuated by what I think is that new modern techno music, the worst music on the planet. I’m sure it is accurate to the time and place of the movie setting, but really obnoxious.

The people are young and bright Harvard students, but not necessarily hip. Most of the protagonists here are geeks and not really social adept. The actors were convincing, I really responded to most of them. There’s a lot of talking, and a lot of it is incomprehensible, and it goes by real fast, so it’s easy to miss some basic plot points. I assume the MTV paced minds this might be targeted to will pick up on everything, but my Howdy Doody paced mind missed a lot. Enough that at the end of the film I was puzzled by a lot of things that seemed unresolved.

Basically it is a docudrama about the guy who invented Facebook and the people surrounding him. Not a real charming guy. I was thinking about movies I had seen recently that might loan their titles to this movie. Waste Land would apply, so would Despicable Me. A bunch of intelligent totally repugnant kids who made huge changes in our society; for better or worse It is not really power they earned or deserved, they just did things because they could. Actually their motivation is much sicker than that, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you.

As the movie evolves and the characters are firmly established, the soundtrack settles down and the story telling progresses. I haven’t a clue about the high tech logarithms, but I do know about the base emotions that these children succumb to. These kids never even try to resolve their emotional issues but take refuge by using their intellect as a tool of revenge, damn the consequences.

I guess my real beef with the movie is that I felt left out, it was big on the loud and fast razzle-dazzle and low on the explanation of major plot points. I think everything may have been included in the movie, but they weren’t accessible to me.