Read “Accidental Billionaires” to compare. Mezrich is certainly no Sorkin, yet somehow the former’s non-brilliant prose doesn’t so weaken what seems to be the story’s strongest theme. For facebook seems not to be a story of a woman jilting a man; rather of adolescents given power to define themselves and their world. Facebook was born among an institution of chauvinistic houses who choose which males will be honored by having nameless females fawn over their elite influence; of venture capital angels who choose which endeavors shall be blessed; at a college that matters because it matters because it mattered. So the movie’s added conceit, of disputed legal accounts, misses the Homeric action, diluting a swift-footed race to establish one’s own identity with a tensionless struggle to define someone else’s. Certainly, there are echoes of the latter theme in, say, online privacy; but that is generally independent of the tragic flaws of Zuckerberg et al. His flaw in the book seems to be the need to control identity, and given the actual evolution of facebook that feels appropriate; so I don’t see why the movie, while mostly keeping the same narrative, instead choose his flaw to be an inability to deal with rejection.