I have been thinking about trust during and after this movie.

There’s trust – well, distrust, mostly – between people, institutions, technology, that felt like a thread linking various layers of the film’s story.

There’s also my trust in Fincher. I’ve seen and liked all of his movies, most recently learning from and admiring all The social network making-ofs showcasing the dedication, the perfectionism, and the intricacy. (Down to stitching individual words from multiple takes of the same scene to get that one perfect sentence.)

And then there’s what Michael Crichton called “the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.” The gist of it is: I know computers. The depiction of computers here and in The social network was very much spot on. For me, that made the rest of the movie so much more believable. And, in turn, so much more enjoyable.

Could write more, but others already did a better job. Nutshell? Brilliant, focused, tense film-making. If I had one complaint it would be that I’d have preferred for this two-hour-forty-minute movie to be… longer. Yes, that surprised me too. Longer. There’s enough good material here for two, if not three movies, and the ending felt unnecessarily rushed.

I hope the trilogy is completed with the same team, and I can revisit that complaint then, looking at the series as a whole. So far, so great.