The story of Facebook gets a trailer

Watch the trailer here

The film, set to debut at the 48th Annual New York Film Festival in September, tells the story of how the stratospherically popular social networking website came to be. It is adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book  Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, which Fortune magazine describes as "a fast-paced tale of intrigue and suspicion that follows Facebook's young founder [Mark Zuckerberg] on his ruthless rise to prominence in Silicon Valley."  

The new teaser trailer has an unconventional, if intriguing structure. Composed like a collage of Facebook chat conversations or status updates, we hear the voices of what we can assume are the pack of Harvard programmers who scrambled for the Facebook riches when the site was still in its embryonic stages back in 2003.

The Social Network is directed by David Fincher - the auteur responsible for Fight Club, Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - and judging by the trailer, with its barbed dialogue and ominous undertones, it will tap into the director's penchant for dark satire, exhibited masterfully in Fight Club, the Brad Pitt/Edward Norton cult hit released in 1999 and adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's eponymous novel.

The cast includes Jesse Einseberg (Zombieland, The Squid and the Whale) as Zuckerberg, as well as singer-actor Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), who has been recently cast as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Marc Webb's upcoming reboot of the popular superhero franchise.