One of my all time favorite movies. I especially love the breakdown of each main character and their ideologies:
At the top, you have the clashing between Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker.
Eduardo is a good guy with bad ideas. He tries to monetize the site too early, and can’t see the forest for the trees. Despite this, he is a team player and is the only person to put his money where his mouth is and fund the company. It’s this naivety that ultimately gets him ousted from his own company by Mark and Sean.
Sean Parker is his exact opposite - a bad guy with really good ideas. He is able to predict the path social media is on, and even calls out the success of photo/video based sites while coked out of his mind. He knows how to influence Mark, but he is a creepy leech who ultimately enjoys lurking after college girls more than he enjoys creating companies.
On the other side, you have the Winklevii and Divya. The very definition of “born on third base and think they hit a triple”.
They are suing Mark mostly based on what they feel their site could have been, vs. what it ever actually was. They never had a website or a product to compare to Facebook. They had a lot of money and influence which they used to consistently fail upwards while thinking they were “playing fair” the whole time.
Finally, there’s Mark caught in the middle. He reminds me a lot of Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler, when Jake Gyllenhaal says “what if my problem wasn’t that I don’t understand people, it was that I don’t like them?”
IMO, Mark understands people better than he’s ever given credit for. He understands the insecurity that drives much of a person’s actions, and the innate desire everyone has for intimacy. This is demonstrated in the beginning of the movie with his facemash site. He knows everyone will use it, because it lets them compare themselves to people they know. This is essentially what Facebook and social media became in the 2010s - a way to compare your whole life to everyone else’s highlight reels.
He also knows that the Winklevii are onto something with their website idea, but he resents them because they don’t even understand why it’s so valuable. He hates how little they crave any kind of companionship or intimacy, since they have grown up in an abundance of both.
Ultimately, the movie is about a bunch of rich kids arguing with each other. 15 years later, everyone involved is richer than they were, and nothing really happened. Sorkin and Fincher took the most boring premise ever and turned it into one of the most fascinating movies I’ve ever watched.