Oscars: Every Best Picture Nominee Of The 2010s - Ranked Worst To Best
6. The Social Network
Facebook is a behemoth, culturally transformative platform that has been both wonderful and absolutely, terrifyingly bad for the world, so it's inevitable that it would inspire some form of secondary artistic response. News stories only get so far, though, and watching the story of Mark Zuckerberg's megalomaniac rise to fame and sorta-glory play out in cinema is a far more compelling, far more accessible experience.
Jesse Eisenberg has never been better (unfortunately, this performance lives on the same bloodline as his Lex Luthor), and his cold detachment is almost alien, it's so convincing. The film stops just short of painting him as a pantomime villain, but there's no getting around the morality of the story and Eisenberg's performance is a big reason why there's so much complexity in the story of one of the biggest "bad guys" in modern business.
Thanks to the deliciously dark real details of the story and the horrible scab-picking way it unravels itself (through the eyes of Andrew Garfield's far more human "hero") it's both a car crash spectacle and a Citizen Kane for our age. If only there was a sequel to continue the story of how one isolated college geek took the world on, stole its data and still managed to retain billions of users.
SG