The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
16. 2010 - The Social Network
Honourable Mentions: Inception, Shutter Island, True Grit
David Fincher's The Social Network may have arrived right at the beginning of the 2010s but it is still very much a defining movie of that decade - one whose ominous conclusions surrounding the Facebook phenomenon only seem to grow starker with each passing year. Fincher's precision-guided directing is well-suited to the bitter story of Mark Zuckerberg's rise - adapted here by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin - and is complemented perfectly by what would become a staple partnership for the filmmaker in a score from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
There's a bleak, morose quality to Fincher's film that dwells not just on the man who made Facebook (Jesse Eisenberg in a career-defining role) and the various relationships that were shattered in the wake of its beginnings, but also on the sense of collective loss that came with its explosion.
Even in 2010, it was clear that the immediate, invasive switch to digital-first living was causing adverse social consequences. Not to the extent and scale that it has spiralled into from the late 2010s onwards, perhaps - where social media has become a tool for radicalisation, surveillance, and political subterfuge - but the most devastating moments of the film are of those pre-Facebook years and the jarring transition to social media drama and interpersonal collapse, exemplified best in the scene where Andrew Garfield's Eduardo Saverin is confronted by his girlfriend Christy (Brenda Song) for not having updated his relationship status on his Facebook profile.
Now, 15 years later, The Social Network's Pandora's Box approach to Facebook and its then still-burgeoning consequences feels even more upsetting and impressive. We didn't know what hit us until it was too late.