social network - movie review

.....social networks.. facebook, orkut, friendster,linked in, twitter,myspace and hundreds of lesser known ones are just that... all about connecting with people and social acceptance.
I saw Wall Street - money never sleeps as well as the first one, Wall Street, featuring the young Charlie Sheen and the much younger Michael Douglas a couple of months back. That is about money, greed, ambition and what the three put together can do to you.
Social Networks, the movie, is the story of how facebook happened, in flash back, through stories told by it's founders- Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin and the Winklevoss twins during the depositions for two seperate lawsuits filed by Saverin and the twins. Eduardo is fighting for recognition for being acknowledged as one of the original founders of facebook and the Winklevoss twins are claiming the idea of a social networking site was originally theirs' . In real life, while Mark Zuckerberg goes from strength to strength with facebook becoming the world's youngest billionaire, Eduardo has dropped out of public life. That's all he wanted : recognition.
and what hurt him the most was Mark betraying him at the behest of Sean Parker (better known as the founder of napster, played brilliantly by Justin Timberlake). " I was your only friend'', he tells Mark during the deposition.
The film moves through the corridors and residences of the Harvard university... where a young computer programming geek or should I say genius, is dumped by his girlfriend. Hurt and angry, he hacks into the databases of various residences and creates a website called facemash.com where male students can choose, which of the two female students featured, is more attractive. As an outcome of which, Mark gets a 6 months academic probation, earns the ire of the female students on campus and is noticed by a group of seniors - the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra who have been toying with the idea of setting up a netwoking site for Harvard students called Harvard connections.
Mark goes on to set up facebook, intially open to Harvard students and then includes students from other campuses after he runs into his ex-girlfriend (not from Harvard) at a restaurant, who has'nt heard of his website.
The story moves from residences in Harvard to Pablo Alto in California, where Mark moves to, in summer, to look for investors and to do some more work on his website after Sean Parker convinces tell him, that that's the place to be for someone, onto something big, like him. In Pablo Alto, facebook evolves with the site hitting a million members (today it has over 500 million), VC fundings coming in and with Sean Parker's increasing involvement in the business decisions of the company, much to the chagrin of Eduardo Saverin.
The movie ends on a piognant note: a successful, rich computer genius losing the only friend he had, trying to reconnect....
brilliant performances by the leads.. Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker). Great Screenplay and dialogues..
A must watch!