NewsFeed enjoys being on Facebook. NewsFeed enjoys the work of actor Jessie Eisenberg. So why doesn’t NewsFeed enjoy the trailer for The Social Network, the new movie about Facebook’s journey from campus time-waster to Internet giant?
The answer, NewsFeed thinks, is in the trailer’s tone. Mark Zuckerberg may be a lot of things (a jerk, a teddy-bear enthusiast, an improbable sex fiend) but he is most definitely not a serial killer. And yet that’s the vibe this teaser trailer gives off, with swelling ominous chords, size-72 Futura Scary font and whispery thriller-voices. They’ve even got Eisenberg doing a Kubrick stare. (A commenter at The A.V. Club notes that director David Fincher has used this teaser style before, in his trailer for The Game.)
And, while we are aware that scenes in teaser trailers often don’t appear in the finished film, NewsFeed still has some qualms about the script. Aaron Sorkin is a fine writer who has greatness in him, but if he has a flaw it is that his scripts are often intoxicated by their own weightiness. That seems to be the case here. “Who should we send it to first?” “Just a couple of people. The question is: Who are they going to send it to?” NewsFeed feels like it has just been hit on the nose.
Still, NewsFeed admits that that final “…No” is pretty great . And, as much as we might regret it, the tagline “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies,” is intriguing enough to make us line up for tickets October 1 — as long as our colleague Dan Fletcher is buying.