The Social Network.

The Social Network, dir. David Fincher. 2010.

Wow, this was an excellent movie. I'd heard all the good things, of course, but I was surprised at how much I wound up liking it.

So yes, The Social Network rehashes the drama surrounding the creation of (The) Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University in 2003-04, and the lawsuits that eventually resulted therefrom. I was hugely amused to see that the valuation of the company given at the end of the film, $25 billion USD, is now widely thought to be too little by about half--after Goldman Sachs sold $1 billion worth of Facebook this month, the company is widely valued at $50 billion. Mark Zuckerberg remains, however, the world's youngest billionaire. Also, the site now has 600 million users instead of a mere 500 million. 

( Who are we supposed to sympathize with? )

That said, though, the movie does portray Zuckerberg unflatteringly--at best he acted highly unethically, but of course the movie is framed around the settlements to the lawsuits that supposedly redressed that. Of course the movie is basically RPF, so ETA: see this TWC Symposium post on RPF, gender, and storytelling, no really, read it now /eta we only have Aaron Sorkin's interpretation to go on, but it's also an interesting study of the contrasts between the Northeast and the West Coast, New York and San Francisco, and having started to live that divide myself, I thought the movie got that brilliantly. I also thought the more or less rampant, if implicit, misogyny of the entire sphere in which the movie takes place seemed pretty accurate. The music, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is amazing, too. Indeed, the one off note for me in the whole thing is that Divya Narendra, an Indian-American from the Bronx, is portrayed by Max Minghella, who is white.