Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get Silicon Valley — case in point — so it is a small miracle that his screenplay about (The) Facebook’s origins works. The Sorkinized version of Mark Zuckerberg bears little resemblance to the real person, if old footage is anything to go by. Yet even this aloof and opportunistic cipher is more human than the soulless privacy-destroying corporate robot that the kind of people who like Sorkin — let’s call them New York Times readers — now see when they look at Zuckerberg.
Much has happened in the 10 years since the movie came out, the least of which is Facebook’s valuation going from $25 billion to $770 billion. I imagine a great deal of the story being depicted differently if it were shot today, including but not limited to the experience of the women involved, the entitlement of most of the protagonists, and Peter Thiel. In fact, with all those culture bombs strung out it’s unlikely it would even see the light of day in 2021, at least not as a David Fincher feature film. In 2010 it had felt too soon for a movie about an internet company that was barely out of infancy. From 2021 hindsight, making it so early seems to have been the right call.