2) The Social Network
Before the overwhelmingly positive reception once people actually saw it (which it may have received precisely because of its low expectations), David Fincher’s The Social Network, deemed “The Facebook Movie” virtually everywhere, was written off. It’s actually a testament to how strong a movie it was and is (slightly better than The Amazing Spider-Man, I’ll admit) that it was able to win over an exceedingly skeptical public. Audiences quickly discovered that anyone who had been asking “Do we really need a movie about Facebook??” had no conception of the movie that Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin had set out to make.
What became obvious once most people had actually seen the movie (maybe not until the second time for some of us—whoops!) was that it’s about much more than Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s really not even about the specifics of those entities themselves, but more about the ideas of culture and class that the story of Facebook inspires. The true story doesn’t fit neatly into a narrative about a character who, in his quest for democratizing social clubs, ends up alienating everyone around him, and so Sorkin and Fincher made it fit. The end result plays with expectations of what a Facebook movie would be, even relies on them in order to subvert them. Despite those who wanted to write it off as unnecessary, The Social Network was one of the essential movies of 2010, in the figurative sense of the word.
