Everyone is calling The Social Network a great film because everyone is in love with Facebook and everyone is in love with the idea of child geniuses becoming billionaires. It’s all idiotic groupie behavior, just like the two women who blow Zuckerberg and his friend in the men’s room of that club. Like those ladies, the critics are also down on their knees, mouths open. Fact is, The Social Network is not a good film, and I found its content rather vile. If this is, as the critics say, a film that “defines a decade,” here’s a vote for collective amnesia.

The Social Network is first and foremost just plain boring. The whole film is about the fact that he got sued, but who really cares that he got sued? The intellectual property issue was not particularly interesting, nor was it explored in a compelling way. What he did to his friend was not particularly interesting. The outcome was certainly not interesting. And everyone is so unlikable it’s not like you’re at least pulling for someone to win!

The film flashes back and forth between multiple depositions and the actual events that preceded them. This structure basically destroyed what little dramatic tension the film might have had. It’s also is just a cop-out, an tacit admission by the filmmakers that they lack the skill and creativity to tell the story in a linear fashion. The depositions are leaned on as a kind of high-class narration. The content of the depositions is pretty dull and completely predictable; they are mainly focused on making Zuckerberg look way smarter and cooler than anyone else in the room.

As far as all the hubbub about whether or not the film is fair to Zuckerberg, it’s all a red herring. The film is definitely pro-Zuckerberg. It doesn’t matter that he’s a complete ass-wipe to everyone in his life – he has 25 billion dollars, so it’s cool. He is portrayed as the “little guy” taking down the establishment, a honor that I’m not sure he deserves. The film is very uncomplimentary to the Winklevoss twins, and as far as Zuckerberg’s friend goes the film takes the attitude “this guy was just a hanger-on, he got his millions, and he got his dick sucked by a smoking-hot, sex-crazed Asian chick with a perfectly round mouth, so he should really just fuck off and disappear.”

Compounding these problems is the fact that Facebook is a relatively insignificant invention, which makes the scenes of its creation pretty uninteresting. Zuckerberg says “I know – we should have a place to enter your dating status!” Ho hum! I can hear the howls of protest now, but really people, let’s for a moment differentiate: The internet itself is an epoch-making invention that (along with Google’s incredible search technology) changed everything. Thanks to these two things, a person’s socio-political thoughts and opinions are no longer completely shaped by the small number of people that happen to surround them on a daily basis, and by a few talking heads on the major networks. This is a significant change for the better.

Facebook? I’m not so sure. It’s basically a database where people up-load trivial personal shit about themselves. It’s never been easier to tell all your friends at once “I took a crap in the bathroom of the Louvre!” Other than that, what the fuck good is it? In the movie, someone says to Zuckerberg “that person just said ‘I’ll Facebook you’ – that’s huge!” Really? Why is that huge? Whether or not you think Facebook is eroding real social connections between people (it seems pretty obvious to me that it is, from my observations, but I suppose you could argue either way,) it is undeniable that Facebook is largely a tool of self-obsession. As far as Facebook as a social revolution, I refer you to Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent and compelling article in the Oct 4 New Yorker, which thoroughly debunks this myth. But really, with a little thought anyone would come to the same conclusion. Facebook started as a way to get laid in college. Now it’s a way for kids and yuppies to waste time. You want to truly change the world? It requires real human interaction – that’s just the way it is.

Lastly, I must say that the misogyny of this film is completely shocking and revolting and troubled me greatly. I’m not talking about Zuckerberg’s much publicized woman-ranking website. I’m talking about the fact that there is hardly a woman with a brain or a scrap of dignity anywhere in this film – the one normal girl in the film rejects him in the first scene (before he’s a billionaire, I might add,) but that hardly excuses what follows. Women in this film are objectified to the level of pornography – they are all thin, hot, dolled-up sex machines, worshiping at the alter of the brainy rich guys who run the world. It’s disgusting. There is the Harvard secret society party where insanely hot college woman are literally bused in for a sex-Bacchanalia. There’s the two Asian chicks who on their first date with Zuckerberg and his friend take them into the men’s room and suck their dicks (they know a woman’s place, damn it, and how a woman gets a real man!) There’s the thin, hot, blond Stanford chippy, ass falling out of her Stanford undies, who’s in ecstasy when she finds out “I just slept with Sean Parker!!!!” (the drug-addicted child who invented Napster.) There are the thin, sexed-up, underage co-eds stripping bare and lying down to serve as a human cocaine table for Justin Timberlake. And on and on and on. It’s unbelievable. I should add that Asian woman are, for whatever reason, particularly objectified in this movie.

The Social Network: today’s America, folks. We idolize genius tech nerds, we worship obscene wealth, and we objectify woman as fucking-machines. Very sad, and certainly nothing we need to make a movie about.