The Social Network

(M) Sony DVD/BD

What a surprise: the inventor of Facebook turned out to be the least social human on the planet.

This story about Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the people he passed over on the way to becoming one of the richest young people on the planet is about the origins of social networking and how not to win friends and influence people.

Zuckerberg is a genius computer programmer who has alienated those around him by his anti-social rants and blogging.

When he is employed by two popular student twins (The Winklevoss brothers played skilfully by the one actor Armie Hammer) he seizes an opportunity to embark on his own social network and becomes mired in legal and personal complications when the Winklevoss’ decide to sue for intellectual property.

As the tag line says “You don’t get 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” The film proves (in spite of the fact that some personal details of those involved are fictionalised) that the social network experiment is fraught with moral, social and ethical dilemmas.

Adrian Drayton