By JASON DONALD STARRING: Jesse Eisenberg Andrew Garfield Justin Timberlake THE digital age has been a quandary of sorts for filmmakers. In real life, almost everyone these days has their head shoved into a laptop or handheld every five minutes - a trend that doesn't really translate to the screen.

With this in mind, director David Fincher's The Social Network focusses on the online phenomena of Facebook with an approach that's closer to the dialogue-heavy dramas of the seventies than anything from the 21st century.

Jesse Eisenberg is Mark Zuckerberg, a brilliant, socially aloof Harvard student, whose hacking of the institution's database leads to the idea of a social networking site with a difference.

Zuckerberg and his buddy Eduardo Saverin (Garfield), both on the fringes of Harvard's party scene, spend their free time rattling out lines of code in a bid for their creation to take off. And take off it does, albeit with a price.

Choosing to skim over the technicalities of an Internet business, The Social Network concentrates more on recrimination, finger-pointing and the legal minefield that rapid success can bring.

"The Facebook" (its original moniker) gathers momentum at a frightening pace and no one, least of all its seemingly unfazed founder, seems to be able to keep tabs on the wreckage it leaves behind.

Eisenberg's star is rising fast and this performance is sure to elevate him to the A-list. He manages to make a cold, difficult and arguably calculating protagonist someone that you can't help but root for. And there is strong support for Spiderman-to-be Garfield, as well as an impressively sinister turn by Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker.

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