The Social Network - A Review

To begin with, my regular readers here will be surprised at a Movie review in my Blog which by the way is a First, there are many reasons to this and out of which one being the involvement of Business/Entrepreneurship in this movie titled “The Social Network” .Never knew the hardships faced by Mark Zuckerberg, to many who is aware of is the CEO/Founder of Facebook, the world’s largest Social Networking site. “The Social Network” is one of the best films I’ve seen this year apart from “Inception” due to its power of writing and Direction. Facebook has become a part of life for many and its evident at the fact that they have a strong customer base of 550 Million subscribers which no other social networking website has. “The Social Network” is a pretty interesting experiment in making a movie about current events especially when the original characters are alive. Zuckerberg, Eduardo Savarin who is the Co-Founder of Facebook and Winklevoss brothers are all real people, and the events depicted in the film are all, within reason, real events that actually happened over the last 7 years.

Any Multi Billion Dollar business comes along with a lot of fighting and conflicts with regards to its founding and the same thing happened in Facebook where the Winklevoss brothers filed a case against Mark for having stole their ideas which were perfectly depicted in the movie. The movie revolves around the case hearing of the Lawsuits filed and the story is shown as each incident is told in the hearing. David Fincher, the Director of the movie along with the Scriptwriter has made the movie look very simple inspite of all the technical terms they use in the movie which a non-techy person like me would have been wondering “What the hell are these guys talking about??” Inspite of not having any Graphical/Visual tricks which most movies are using as their USP, the Director has indeed put the movie together in such a way that the movie doesn’t go slow or lag to make yourself bored.

I really liked the character played by Jesse Eisenberg who as Mark Zuckerberg really felt inside me that probably he is the real Mark, The way the dialogues were delivered were really great and thoughtful by the director as being the kind of geek he is, he had to speak everything very fast with lots of technical terms which were done perfectly. Surprise package in the movie was the appearance of Pop singer Justin Timberlake who plays the role of Sean Parker which I’m sure people who follow him would have gone crazy watching him in the big screen. Given that Facebook is what it is today I believe this has come at the right time for them to reach their next big number which is 1 Billion subscribers which is 1/7^th of the world population. Man!! That indeed is a great number which Mark and his team will die to reach!!

The movie is indeed an inspiration to many who follow Shiv Kera’s statement “Successful People don’t do different things, they do things Differently”. The movie clearly shows this as when there were websites like MySpace and Friendster, Mark went onto to see what they had never envisioned, Mark wanted to explore various other ways of attracting the crowd and Facebook has indeed successfully done it. Another interesting point to be noted is the un-willingness of Mark to make business profits out of it in the initial stage of its growth inspite of various sources of funds they were getting by way of advertisements. Eduardo Savarin, who is named as the Company’s CFO in the beginning brings in Advertisors and it was Mark who thought the subscribers would start unsubscribing to the site when they see the advertisements. The thought process really worked for Mark with his correct decision and it is only during the recent past that they have started using the marketing aspect for its growth. The Company "Facebook" is now worth $25 Billion!!

The Social Network has indeed shown the most infuential invention of this generation and will be remembered for many years to come and anyone looking for a Entrepreneurial venture in the future, this is where you can get your inspiration from.

My Formula/Rating is a 4.5/5 (Only because havent seen anyone giving a 5/5 or else it’s a perfect 5)