The anti-social network

Aaron Sorkin’s pacy but ultimately frustrating Facebook drama, The Social Network is hardly a contender for film of the year. By the end it felt like I’d been watching a dreary Premiership score-draw – another bunch of millionaire bitches running round, shouting, “It was my idea, no it was my idea.” My guess is that the majority of UK users of Facebook will have had no idea that the site had such lofty origins as Harvard as we didn’t get our grubby hands on it until after it had been through the American Ivy League.

Facebook's origins are fairly irrelevant, as is the film and the fortunes made by its founders and would-be founders. The real problem we should consider is that I don’t feel as if this story has run it’s course yet - not the whole, who invented Facebook story but, the Facebook story as a whole. The whole film feels therefore unworthy of such attention. My first feeling was, why haven’t they made the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs Story yet – perhaps they have, perhaps they’re waiting for them to die. Perhaps there is a sense that Facebook has reached its pinnacle and it’s all downhill from here with the emergence and rise of Twitter and the Chinese new generation social networks.

If there isn’t enough subject matter for the film to cover, then at least beef up the lead - Zuckerberg has been in a relationship since he began the site, why make him such a one dimensional asshole if you’re gonna make him an asshole? We even found ourselves in a fantasy Henley meeting Prince Albert of Monaco just to make it interesting for five minutes. The only person with the opportunity to spice is Timberlake which he never really gets the license to. Timberlake’s role in fact sums up how The Social Network leaves you, coated in a thin film of shiny unpleasantness, ironically much like using Facebook itself. And if it teaches us anything, apart from how some people made so much money it’s unfuckingbelievable, then that lesson is be careful how you choose your friends and if you can at all help it, don’t join Facebook. Oh for a can of UBIK.