It is just a rehash of an old Hollywood cliché: "college is just sex and booze":
* A bus full of hot girls arriving to be used for sex
* A programming competition where the crowd cheers at each line of coded Python. The coders drink a shot to commemorate. Hint: try to program under alcohol influence.
* The hero hacks one site in one night when drunk and in 2 hours it crashes the network
* All nerds are socially inept and incapable of getting girlfriends but still Zuck has smart psychological insights about what the site needs to succeed.
* Teenagers outsmarting experienced lawyers with witty responses.
* Sex, booze and testosterone is what drives every man.
Did we even see the same movie? We're talking about the social network, right? The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!) by every organization in every category? The movie regularly voted as one of the best films of the last 18 years?
I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie. The whole conceit was that a brilliant technical expert's unexpected success pushes him into a world he is not emotionally or socially prepared to handle, and ultimately his arrogance and hubris leaves him alone and unhappy as he pushes away the people in his life one by one, ending SPOILER ALERT
beautifully with him quietly desperately refreshing his ex's facebook page alone, starting to recognize how much he regrets everything that he has lost in his pursuit for wealth and power...
Most of the movie isn't about college, or sex, or booze. If you had to could you have broken a site from that era in 2 hours? I'd be shocked if you couldn't. Lots of these sites would die when they get a little too much traffic. Some sites still do today. Security was an afterthought back then. Zuck had a girlfriend, and his friends do just fine. The lawyers are dealing with so much wealth and power in the hands of people who are so young and emotionally immature and they handle it exactly how I'd expect them to.
Zuck in the movie is driven by a lust for wealth and power, which is a universal theme in basically every story in human history.
> The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!)
Yes it is the same movie. If the judgement of the entertainment industry and public were any measure of quality then "Big Bang Theory" should be an excelent show, when in truth it is just a childish nerd version of those blackface movies from early 20th century. Millions loved it? Millions are wrong.
> I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie.
I just described scenes. Watch the movie you'll see those scenes.
I don't see the "brilliance" you describe, just a lot of clichés in fast montage to blur out the shallowness.
I found it particularly bizarre that social media had become such an important aspect of our lives as to demand a “creation myth” account of its inception.
The only thing I enjoyed about that movie were the Elo formulae and the soundtrack (the metal rendition of Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King that runs behind the rowing race is particularly good, as is the track titled “Painted Sun in Abstract”).
>> I found it particularly bizarre that social media had become such an important aspect of our lives as to demand a “creation myth” account of its inception.
The 'creation myth' already existed, and just like the 'creation myth' of Apple, what we get down the road is the badly-watered-down, Hollywood version of the 'broken telephone' conversation about the myth...which is a lot of degrees of separation from the truth.
And the problem is, people are going into the theatre expecting certain events to happen based off of entirely fictional past events.
>> The only thing I enjoyed about that movie were the Elo formulae and the soundtrack (the metal rendition of Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King that runs behind the rowing race is particularly good, as is the track titled “Painted Sun in Abstract”).
I think everyone can agree if there's an upside to that film it's certainly Reznor's soundtrack. :-)
