David Fincher, George Lucas, and James Cameron are three of Hollywood's most brilliant, prolific, game-changing filmmakers. Are they also hypocrites? Using the anti-Facebook sentiments in the recent trailer for Fincher's The Social Network as a springboard, Movieline examines the mixed messages these directors are sending. Given their notoriety for enormous budgets, revolutionary film technology, and reliance on cutting-edge special effects, why do they make so many movies that are so blatantly anti-technology?:

However, there may be no director whose themes are more schizophrenic than James Cameron, who constantly flips between worshiping grand technology and stigmatizing the kind of personality who employs it. In Avatar, as in Lucas's Ewok battle, the high-tech invading troops are laid low by organic fighters who have no need for electricity at all. In Titanic, just the idea of the incredibly expensive boat is held up as the height of hubris, despite the fact that Cameron himself was making the most expensive film ever at the time, and he's not exactly the first person you'd expect to scoff at hubris. The Terminator films vividly portray the apocalyptic future that results when technology is left unchecked, but Cameron is a constant innovator in those fields, consistently surfing a high-tech cutting edge and even inventing new technology himself in pre-production for his movies.

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