Weeks before David Fincher’s The Social Network is set to premiere at the New York Film Festival, Variety/LA Weekly/Village Voice film critic turned film programer Scott Foundas is the first person to see Fincher’s The Social Network and go on record about the film. What did he think? Well he liked it, he liked it quite a lot in fact he compares it to the likes of All the President’s Men and The Great Gatsby, stating its “Quentin Tarantino crossed with Bill Gates.” In a lengthy review/philosophical musing posted on the NYFF’s Film Comment website Foundas says that the film is rife with suspense and challenges the modern day notions of friendship and isolation:
This is very rich material for a movie on such timeless subjects as power and privilege, and such intrinsically 21st-century ones as the migration of society itself from the real to the virtual sphere—and David Fincher’s The Social Network is big and brash and brilliant enough to encompass them all. … But just as All the President’s Men—a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac—was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. And it owes something to The Great Gatsby, too, in its portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle. … The writing is razor-sharp and rarely makes a wrong step, compressing a time-shifting, multi-character narrative into two lean hours, and, perhaps most impressively, digests its big ideas into the kind of rapid-fire yet plausible dialogue that sounds like what hyper computer geeks might actually say (or at least wish they did): Quentin Tarantino crossed with BillGates . … The Social Network is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller, packed with energetic incident and surprising performances (not least from Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, who’s like Zuckerberg’s flamboyant, West Coast id). It is a movie of people typing in front of computer screens and talking in rooms that is as suspenseful as any more obvious thriller. But this is also social commentary so perceptive that it may be regarded by future generations the way we now look to Gatsby for its acute distillation of Jazz Age decadence.
Foundas’ opinion may be slightly influenced by the fact that The Social Network is opening the New York Film Festival and Foundas is acting as associate director of said festival, but his praise for the film is well-articulated and seemingly genuine.
