I waited to see the new Facebook movie until it was released, so I took off this afternoon and saw it at the Union Square multiplex along with a packed house of other rain-soaked New Yorkers.

A few observations.

1. It's a very watchable movie, but what would you expect from Aaron Sorkin. It flowed like a double episode of The West Wing. Nothing as great as the best West Wing dialog, though.

2. It was probably too much to ask that the movie have the bite and wisdom and depth of The Fight Club, since both movies were directed by David Fincher. Fight Club was a great movie.

3. The Social Network is not a great movie, and despite what some people say, it will not make history or be remembered. I suppose it will win some awards.

4. Having lived the Silicon Valley lifestyle, I can say they got a tiny bit of it right, but most of it is a Hollywood fantasy.

5. I was at Harvard, believe it or not, when all this stuff was supposed to have taken place. It's more a testimony to how much I was not part of mainstream life at Harvard that I had no idea what was going on with Facebook. I didn't hear about it until I visited a campus in North Carolina.

6. I'd love to know what really happened with Eduardo, the other founder. I don't believe for a minute that Facebook's lawyers pulled such a fast one on him. They have no incentive to do it. And the Winkelvii didn't really have much of a case, again, if that's what really happened. All the stuff involving them made me think they were idiots. Not much drama there, not even much humor. (Lessig, a lawyer, is embarassed for the lawyers in his review of the movie.)

7. I would have loved to have known more about Zuckerberg. He was of course the main, most interesting character. I don't think they got Sean Parker right. (I've met him, he's a pretty smart guy, nowhere near as simple as the character in the movie.)

8. Some parts of what they reported on were real enough. The programmers with headphones keeping the world from interfering, that's real. I'd love to see someone make a movie of Microserfs someday, though it would be a bit dated by now, that story capture the real experience of creative people in the tech world. Obviously what happens at Facebook (the real one) is interesting, but this movie wasn't very interesting or realistic.

9. Pity they didn't call it The Social Graph.

 10/1/2010; 4:11:56 PM.   .