How do you make a good website? Fincher doesn’t have answer, but he knows how to make a good film: ‘The Social Network’ (Movie review)

I love the combination of director David Fincher and historical topics. In his 2007 movie “Zodiac,” it seemed like he went back in time to a 1970s newsroom to capture the drama around the hunt for a serial killer.

He works his magic again on “The Social Network,” but it seems like he had to work harder this time. You can sense the strain in Trent Reznor’s intense score. The hard truth is that serial killers are a sexier topic than socially awkward web programmers.

That having been said, this is pretty much the best movie that could possibly be made about the creation of a website. Although we’re not going back to the ’70s this time — just 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) launched The Facebook, a social-networking site for Harvard students — I still felt like I was digging into a richly detailed past. Even though the movie is about the Internet, the real-world settings come alive — notably the Harvard campus, with buildings as old as 335 years.

It’s an ensemble movie, but Eisenberg is the centerpiece. If he’s not in a scene, he’s the topic of the scene. The irony of Zuckerberg, of course, is that while he created a social-networking website, he is horrible at socializing — although he’s not necessarily a horrible guy. He’s the type of guy who will go along with something morally wrong, but have doubts about it the whole way. A lawyer observing Zuckerberg at the hearings that provide the movie’s framework sums him up thusly: “You’re not an a******, you just try really hard to be.”

So the movie works as a character study, and to a lesser extent as a law drama. (In a nutshell, Zuckerberg got his site up first, and some of his early collaborators at Harvard feel he misled them about their level of involvement. But don’t feel too bad for them; they ended up getting their cut.)

But why was Facebook able to steal the thunder from Friendster and MySpace? That’s a compelling question that’s not quite answered by Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, whose biting dialogue is on display starting with an opening scene where Zuckerberg annoys his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend with his lack of tact.

Although the actual reason for Facebook’s success is open to debate, the reason posited by the movie is exclusivity (which creates a coolness factor): At first, you had to have a Harvard e-mail address to get a Facebook page. So Facebook grows not the way most websites hope to grow (give the whole world access from the beginning, and hope it catches on), but rather by expanding its market as if it were opening stores in new towns.

Zuckerberg expands Facebook to Yale, Columbia and Stanford. Later, he wants to add Baylor to the fold, but Baylor already has a popular social-networking site, so he opens Facebook to every school within a 100-mile radius of Baylor. It’s a surround-and-conquer scheme, and it works. As “The Social Network” unfolds, a viewer gets a sense that Facebook can’t be stopped (yet at the same time, we get a sense of the exhausting work behind the scenes by a growing team of employees who know that Facebook must never crash, not even for a minute, because that’s what doomed Friendster).

I remember a few years ago when a friend showed me his Facebook page, explaining that although it was more user-friendly than MySpace, it wasn’t nearly as widespread because it was only open to college students. A couple years later, it opened up to everybody. And now it’s not necessarily cool anymore — and frankly, it’s not perfect either — but it is arguably the most convenient communication tool available on the Internet. Today, colleges, newspapers and movies (including “The Social Network,” natch) have Facebook pages, in addition to their own websites, which may or may not be more user-friendly than Facebook.

But, of course, functionality is not entirely the point. The point is going where the people (read: potential money-spenders) are. Zuckerberg initially needed to get people on Facebook, so he had his roommate e-mail the link to members of his fraternity. Today, the reverse is the case: Entities use Facebook to get people to their own site.

It’s an amazing success story. And also a bittersweet one, as we see from following the socially challenged Zuckerberg, who changed the way we socialize.

Share your thoughts on “The Social Network” below. And, for ironic giggles, let me know if you clicked on my Facebook link to get here.