Social Network, The

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

After getting dumped by his girlfriend, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg decides to create a site that rates the hotness factor of girls on campus. His work gets picked up by the wealthy twins Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, along with their friend Divya Narendra, and they ask him to make a social networking site for students of Harvard. Mark, however, has other ideas. Together with his friend Eduardo Saverin, who finances it, he sets up “TheFacebook”, a social networking site of his own, which quickly becomes extremely popular.

As sole investor, Eduardo starts looking for opportunities to make money of the site and immediately starts looking for companies interested in advertising. Zuckerberg on the other hand feels that online ads would make the site lose its “cool” factor. When the two meet up with Napster founder Sean Parker, Zuckerberg is immediately impressed with the man and it doesn’t take long for the two visionaries to get together and form an alliance that will ultimately destroy the relationship between Zuckerberg and Saverin.

Sound and Vision:
We got to check out the DVD instead of the Blu-ray, but have to admit that for a DVD this disk really shines. The colors aren’t flashy, and there’s a green/yellow glow in the movie, but that’s a decision of the maker and not a problem of the disc. The image is sharp, has good contrast and shadow detail as well as decent depth. We didn’t spot any compression errors nor grain.

The sound comes with a 5.1 track that has some nice atmospheric sounds coming from the surround speakers which make it more dynamic than you would expect from such a dialogue-driven movie.

Extras:
- Audio commentary with David Fincher
- Audio commentary with writer Aaron Sorkin and part of the cast
- How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook
- Jeff Cronenweth and David Fincher on the Visuals
- Angus Wall, Kirk Baxter, and Ren Klyce on Post
- Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and David Fincher on the Score
- In the Hall of the Mountain King: Music Exploration Swarmatron
- Ruby Skye VIP Room: Multi-Angle Scene Breakdown

An interesting pack of extras with especially the extensive Making Of “How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook” standing out.

Conclusion:
The Social Network sounds like a boring movie about nerds and lots of coding, but David Fincher managed to make it interesting to watch with some dark pitches and by focusing on the relationship between the different characters. Fincher constantly switches between court cases and the main story about the start of Facebook but while this sometimes confuses in other movies, it doesn’t here thanks to a good pace and plenty of variation which makes that the movie never has a dull moment.

Jesse Eisenberg puts down magnificent performance here as he’s completely believable as Mark Zuckerberg, a guy described by his ex girlfriend not as a nerd but as a jerk, but also the rest of the cast does a great job.

The DVD comes with very good image and sound quality (although the bitrate for the sound could be a bit higher resulting in more detail) and is packed with some interesting extras. Definitely one to check out!

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