David Fincher, director of incredible films such as Zodiac, Fight Club, and Se7en, is directing a movie about Facebook. Wait, what the fuck? Is that really what was happening?! I couldn’t have been less excited. Then the trailer came out…yup, sure did look like a movie that David Fincher made about Facebook! I remember getting an email to my campus address back in 2004 for Facebook and signing up for it, of course. When I realized that I couldn’t see things unless I friended people, and that Facebook was exclusive, I deleted it, because that’s fucking stupid. I then wanted to check a few months later and see if my classmate was the girl from Road Rules, so I signed up again, only to find out my profile was still active. What the fuck?! And, well, I guess that’s my history with Facebook.

Who the fuck meets people through the internet? Buncha a weirdos, kids these days!

In 2003, the internet was just starting to get more personal, and there were more and more social communities where you could share pictures, interests, and information. At the time, those websites were things like Livejournal, Friendster, and MySpace. They were met with varying success, but it wasn’t until Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, started working on a website that encapsulated all of the things you could find on other websites, but made it exclusive to people attending Harvard. From there, it extended from school to school, one at a time, and grew and grew and grew. The Social Network depicts not only the course of events that happened in the launching of this website, but the legal battles that followed due to conflicts over who owned the intellectual property, the financial aspect, and just the idea in general.

Now featuring twice the amount of cocksuckers, thanks to those rascally Winklevoss twins!

Every time I hear something about getting “tagged”, or bullshit about writing on someone’s “wall”, or that fucking Farmville thing, I throw up in my mouth a little bit, and make a mental note to not have a conversation with that person about anything. While watching The Social Network, I completely forgot that this movie was based on the creation of this website. It plays as more of a legal thriller rather than a docu-drama about a website that’s popular. I think this credit belongs to both Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, as well as David Fincher. Aaron Sorkin just has this way of writing these casual conversations that make you hang on every word and are completely engaged, regardless of the fact that people were conversing about a website. And having Fincher, who typically deals with slightly darker, moodier subject matter, was a wonderful choice in grounding this film to the real world and portraying people who weren’t necessarily the smartest or most likable, but had good ideas and great timing. Every scene plays out as though you have been involved in an interaction like that before, thanks to Sorkin, yet seemed to take place in an alternate reality that had muted colors, lights, and characters that you could never possibly interact with, thanks to Fincher.

PRETENTIOUS FUCKING ASSHOLES IN THEIR GODDAMNED NORTH FACE JACKETS.

I’m always blown away by the amount of work David Fincher puts into his films and how much research there is. Just take a glimpse at the trivia page for this movie on IMDb and you’ll begin to see how he controls everything about every actor in every scene, and in a good way. From the fact that he forbade any of the actors from meeting their real life counterparts, to filming a scene with eight pages of dialogue 99 times, to making Eisenberg only wear clothes that had been worn by Zuckerberg, no detail goes unnoticed. Did I mention the fact that there are identical twins in this movie, being portrayed by the same actor? Finding no adequate twin actors, he filmed everything with a stand-in body, and then digitally added the original actor’s face to the double, and he did this almost seamlessly. Not to say that the actors didn’t hold their own, but since they were all relatively subtle portrayals of actual people, it’s hard to cite one in particular for their stand out performance. So, looking back on it, yes, David Fincher really did make a movie about Facebook, and it was fucking awesome.

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