Review: The Social Network

The Sci-Fi Gene blog is two years old. Last weekend I was at Howl At The Moon shooting footage of a live performance. Other current projects include finishing post-production on Bast, and a music video that is slowly coming together. Plans for the next year: more shorts and perhaps music videos. A feature lurks at the edge of my mind but realistically this would be a massive undertaking and is still several checkpoints away.

The Social Network has a witty, intelligent, non-condescending script and perfect delivery by the cast: Jesse Eisenberg is riveting to watch as Mark Zuckerberg - it's a lesson in how an actor can portray superintelligence and social naivete - but this is very much an ensemble piece. It's tense and exciting despite there being no action whatsoever. Finally a film has been made with accurate portrayals of websites and operating systems, hacking and computers in general.

The film also features Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker and could pave the way for a whole series of spin-off films based on other websites: I look forward to a docudrama about Ikea's Ask Anna.

I think that, while this film is one of the best-made and most enjoyable dramas I've seen for a long time, it should be treated with caution in terms of historical accuracy: it's taken from "The Accidental Billionaires" a book by Ben Mezrich written in consultation with Zuckerberg's former colleague Eduardo Saverin, so may well be a one-sided interpretation. If you also enjoyed this film you might want to check out Micro Men, the BBC's dramatization of the rise of the microcomputer and the rivalry between inventors Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry.