With some 500 million active users worldwide, David Fincher’s film ‘The Social Network’, looking at the life and times of Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has built in mass global appeal.

The Colorado born director makes the most of such a great opportunity and comes up with a superbly crafted film. The screenplay, brilliantly written by Aaron Sorkin from the book by Ben Mezrich, sharply depicts the inside story to ‘Facebook’.

We find out the genesis of ‘Facebook’ takes place one Spring night in 2003 when Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg, drunk and agitated by a rejection from a woman he was interested in, taps away at his keyboard and comes up with the skeleton of the site that was to become the social pulse of the internet.

In no time at all it becomes clear that Zuckerberg has hit the jackpot big time, and the film focuses on the main players wanting a piece of the action, with the disputes ending in court action. ‘The Social Network’ is structured around the court cases that take place with continuance use of flashbacks.

The film provides intriguing character studies of the main players, backed up by fine performances by the cast. Jesse Eisenberg is the lead, Andrew Garfield plays Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s friend who is his original business partner who gets burnt, Justin Timberlake makes a big impression as the super-smart and sleazy Napster founder, Sean Parker, who takes Facebook to Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, and Armie Hammer and Josh Pence play the Winklevoss twins, classmates of Zuckerberg who accuse him of stealing their idea.

In the end one is left with this picture. ‘The Social Network’ is a huge fairy story, about a nerdy, young Harvard undergrad becoming the world’s youngest ever billionaire, but it also is intensely Shakespearean, showing the darker sides of human nature, and how envy, greed and avarice can cloud the most fortunate of lives.