The Social Network, 2010.
Directed by David Fincher.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, and Max Minghella.
SYNOPSIS:
The Social Network gets a standalone 4K Ultra HD release after previously only being found in the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 2 set. You also get a code for a digital copy, as well as Blu-ray discs that house all of the extras (and a second copy of the movie, albeit one from 2011). There’s tons of great bonus content here. Highly recommended.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should get something out of the way first: I worked at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, from 2016 to 2022. This isn’t a review I would have written while I was an employee there, and, honestly, it’s not a review I would have written after I left, just in case I might want to boomerang, as they say, but in light of the last few months, I feel differently.
Between CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg getting rid of a lot of things that made the company a great place to work (so many of my colleagues were smart, wonderful people), laying people off in capricious ways (sadly, some of those aforementioned colleagues were part of those layoffs), and bending the knee to Donald Trump (that photo of him, Bezos and others at the inauguration will go down in infamy), I can’t imagine returning to work there.
And that’s what makes David Fincher’s classic movie The Social Network so prescient to me as I revisited it for its 15th anniversary. Mark was, honestly, pretty affable and even had a good sense of humor when I saw him at internal company events (okay, yes, he was preaching to the choir), but he has now shown another side of himself, one that was laid bare in this film. When someone shows you who they are, believe them, to paraphrase Maya Angelou.
Zuckerberg and his allies love to quibble over a lot of the details in this movie, but, of course, they’re missing the point of this kind of bio pic. The point of The Social Network is to chart the company’s rapid rise in the early 2000s and show us how many people reveal their true selves when a lot of money and power is on the line. So if screenwriter Aaron Sorkin invented specific interactions, the viewer shouldn’t get caught up in those details, but, rather, look at what the scenes are telegraphing about the people in them, based on what they do and say.
After all, the full title of the 2009 book that Sorkin relied on as the foundation of his screenplay is The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. That pretty much sums up The Social Network, which takes us from Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room days through the nascent period of The Facebook, as it was originally known, in Palo Alto, California. Along the way, we see him repeatedly treat people in ways that are cold and calculating, as if he builds an algorithm in his head for every interaction and tries to figure out how to produce an optimal result for himself.
The Social Network was previously available on 4K Ultra HD as part of the Columbia Classics 4K Ultra HD Collection: Volume 2, and my understanding is that these are the same discs found in that set, only now found in a handsome Steelbook package. (You get a code for a digital copy too.) The only extras on the 4K platter are a trio of theatrical trailers, so the film gets plenty of breathing room, so to speak, for its picture quality. Apparently Fincher made a few digital nips and tucks to this one, but nothing stood out in that regard. As with his other films, his use of digital effects is almost always seamless.
You also find the film on an accompanying Blu-ray, although my understanding is that it’s the same disc issued in 2011. The only extras on that disc are two commentary tracks, one with Fincher and one with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and cast members Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Justin Timberlake, and Josh Pence.
The Fincher track is, of course, a great listen, and the group track was actually recorded in a few different sessions, with an unknown moderator setting up who they are. As a result, the group track doesn’t fall into the many pitfalls that can bedevil such commentaries, including opaque references to inside jokes, rambling way off-topic, and simply describing what’s on the screen while talking about how cool it was to shoot that part of the film.
The rest of the extras are found on the second Blu-ray, and they kick off with the excellent How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?, which runs 92 minutes and gives the kind of exhaustive overview of the making of the film that we don’t usually get on home video anymore.
The other bonus features run about 70 minutes total and dig into the photography, the sound design, the score, and a multi-angle exploration of the club scene where Sean Parker of Napster fame sells Zuckerberg on his vision of what was known as “The Facebook” at the time. It probably didn’t really unfold that way, like a lot of moments in The Social Network, but that’s not the point of this kind of movie, which strives to get to the heart of its subject matter.
And, wow, when I revisited this one in the year 2025, I realized that The Social Network lays bare its subject in a way that was incredibly prescient when it was made in 2010. And I guess I should have realized that Zuckerberg’s affable persona at company events was an act all along.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
