I'm sure there are few people who don't know that this film is about the origins and subsequent legal disputes over the ownership of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg created the website at Harvard in 2004, with the financial help of a friend and some creative help (or so this film assumes) unwittingly provided by a trio of upper class jocks. Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg, the likeable lead from Zombieland. As such, although he's frequently gauche and occasionally a bit of a tit, 'Zuckerberg' seems largely likeable. It's unclear how similar 'Zuckerberg' is to Zuckerberg. And that's the only downside to a fast-paced, dialogue-heavy movie: I would much have preferred to know that what I was watching was a close approximation to the truth - though, for reasons the postscript explains, that truth is valuable and closely guarded. Facebook is so much a part of most of our lives that its origins are bound to be a subject of curiosity. But, even taken largely as a work of fiction, The Social Network is well worth seeing. It's not a cinematic movie, though, so one to add to the rental list rather than struggling to see it before it leaves the big screen.
