I just saw The Social Network movie. From a geeky perspective, its a very interesting movie. But I don’t know if it will be entertaining enough for the general public. Also I say this with the perspective of having read the book, and as most movies based on books, they missed lots of details and changed some events.
The highlights for me, besides the fact that it is interesting to watch the story of a web startup grow, was the more than normal geeky parts. Almost all of the screens of facebook development were using KDE, and Mark Zuckerberg is always shown coding in GNU Emacs. And its the first movie where I ever hear someone say the words “emacs” and “perl script”. Although now that I think about it, why would he use Perl when we all know Facebook is all done on PHP. There was actually some PHP code screens on the movie as well.
So if you’re going to see the movie, don’t expect a highly entertaining movie. Its a bit dull and boring at parts with too much dialog going on. But as a friend told me: “what did u expect? a car chase in downtown Palo Alto?”. If you have already seen the movie, I recommend you to read the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
to really grasp the details of what is portrayed there. Anyway, nor the book or the movie are completely true, so take it with a grain of salt.
The music by Trent Reznor was great 🙂
One reply on “The Social Network Movie”
He mentioned “Perl script” when he was talking about spidering/downloading images, which makes perfect sense.