The trailer for The Social Network: Would you like to become a fan?
Although producer Kevin Spacey has insisted that the upcoming David Fincher-directed, Aaron Sorkin-written The Social Network will be “a lot funnier” a film than you’d expect—especially from the minds behind relentlessly bleak projects like Se7en and Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip—its recently released trailer doesn’t really bear that out. Instead, the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (played here by Jesse Eisenberg) is all ominous brass sections and bold title cards proclaiming him a “PUNK, GENIUS, PROPHET, TRAITOR, BILLIONAIRE,” while also reminding us that “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making some enemies,” particularly when you use Foursquare. Zuckerberg’s ruthless climb to the top of the wasting-time-on-the-web empire is reinforced by equally melodramatic dialogue snippets like, “We don’t know what it can be; we don’t know what it will be. We know that it is cool.” Okay, that’s pretty funny.