Is The Social Network The Best Movie Of The Year?

I watched The Social Network about a couple weeks ago and I have been struggling with this question. I know many people have said they feel it is the best movie of the year, but I'm not completely sure I agree with them.

I want to get this out of the way immediately and say that I thought The Social Network is an amazing movie. It takes some talent to take relatively boring proceedings and come up with a film that is very exciting and engaging. Scenes where all that happened was computer coding were made to seem like momentous occasions. I realize that is very difficult to pull off and The Social Network does it with very little problem.

The only reason I don't say it is the best movie of the year in my opinion is because I enjoyed Inception a lot more. Now that is my personal preference. I can see why many believe that The Social Network is the best movie of 2010. I have a couple problems with that movie which keeps it from being the best movie of the year.

While the story is based on the origins of Facebook and is for all intensive purposes a "true story", I feel like a large part of the story was dramatized for the big screen. Now The Social Network was not the first movie to take some liberties with a true story, nor will it be the last to do so. Nonetheless it brought me out of the experience to think that this really happened. On a number of levels I just couldn't imagine that is the way things turned out, which brought me out of the experience.

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg was really amazing. Andrew Garfield also did a great job as Eduardo Saverin. The acting as a whole in the movie was spectacular. In a movie of this type the acting needs to be pin point perfect to lift a movie to the heights that The Social Network often reaches. Despite all that I kept coming back to the notion that the story was too unbelievable.

I know that criticism seems really childish when I say that Inception was my favorite movie of the year, but when a movie is based in reality I can't help but notice when something seems out of place. A movie like Inception is based in another world essentially so my belief is suspended, I am just along for the magical ride. When you tell me something actually happened, then there are certain expectations that come with that.

So is The Social Network the best movie of the year? Well in my opinion it is not, but it is awfully close to being the best movie of the year. It's all subjective anyways and I know many people do not agree with me, but the movie that mesmerized me the most this past year was Inception.