Directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network chronicles the turbulent creation of Facebook and the legal battles that followed. The film portrays Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg as a brilliant but socially ruthless visionary who alienates friends and partners on his rise to becoming the world's youngest billionaire. A gripping blend of ambition, betrayal, and moral complexity, it stands as one of the defining films of the 21st century.
Aaron Sorkin's opening Harvard bar scene is the genre's modern thesis: dialogue at speed, the world re-engineered between sentences.
Mark Zuckerberg breaks up with Erica Albright at a Boston bar. Five minutes of overlapping Sorkin dialogue establishes ambition, contempt, class anxiety, and the personality flaw that will found Facebook. Fincher cuts at the punchline. The rest of the film proves it.
Fincher and Sorkin film Facebook's founding as a betrayal and a deposition. The technology is the deposition; the apocalypse is everyone who clicked accept.