Inert ‘THE SOCIAL RECKONING’ Misses Fincher Badly

The Social Network is a brilliant film. The Social Reckoning is decidedly not. The sequel to David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 dramatization of the early days of Facebook brings all of Sorkin’s strengths and weaknesses into sharp focus, as this time the man behind such films as Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and Being the Ricardos both writes and directs. Without Zuckerberg at its center, The Social Reckoning is instead broadly concerned with Facebook’s policies, its algorithms, and the investigative effort to expose how the company was shirking its responsibilities for user safety. There is righteous anger in the writing and moments where everything kind of clicks into place, but Sorkin’s direction is so sluggish and uninspired that every choice, from the way he directs his actors to the way he frames a scene, makes you appreciate all over again what Fincher brought to the original.

The story is framed through Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook engineer turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) as they circle the revelations that would become the Pulitzer Prize-winning Facebook Files. Horwitz is not tech savvy, a point borne out through increasingly cringey interactions where he admits that not only does he have no social media accounts, he can’t figure out how to use his car’s navigation system. Why a reporter who fails to understand the basic tenets of modern technology is assigned a tech beat is explained through a comparison to All the President’s Men: the reporters who broke Watergate weren’t political reporters either. They were from metro. Frances then responds to the word “metro” as though he means “metrosexual,” making a truly confounding reference to mousse. It’s shit like this that I found baffling throughout, references that feel anachronistic in a movie about events from, what, five years ago? Sorkin keeps reaching into his bag and pulling out material that might have felt contemporary in the early aughts. Even in the writing, there’s no evidence of a craft refined to meet this moment, just the same drain he’s been circling for decades.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Being the Ricardos‘ directed by Aaron Sorkin and starring Nicole Kidman]

Frances is initially reticent. She loves her job. She believes in Facebook’s mission to connect people, particularly the more socially awkward among us who thrive in an online capacity. But she’s increasingly troubled by what the platform is becoming. A deliberately uncomfortable prologue introduces one of her former “friends,” drunk on the side of the road and filming herself as two police officers of color approach. She starts calling them “DEI,” insulting them, actively provoking a confrontation for online likes. This, we’re told, was once someone who supported progressive candidates. Something happened to her. 

The movie’s explanation is Facebook itself. One of the more troubling statistics presented is that 64 percent of Facebook users who joined fringe hate groups were served that content rather than seeking it out. They were invited in. Asked to join with the click of a button. It’s that realization that pushes Frances into becoming a source, even as she keeps throwing up walls and lines in the sand she will not cross. Her first conversation with Horwitz is said to be their last conversation. She won’t go on record. She can’t provide internal documents. Horwitz keeps reeling her in, she keeps pulling away, and a cat-and-mouse relationship develops before COVID upends both their lives. She begins working remotely from Puerto Rico. He follows. The investigation continues.

The problem is that The Social Reckoning operates under the assumption that the audience isn’t already aware of what this reporting uncovered. Facebook was promoting hate groups. It refused to meaningfully fact-check political advertising. Its platform was being used for drug and human trafficking. And it played a direct role in creating the information ecosystem that led to January 6, allowing incendiary claims about a stolen election to proliferate even when they were being propagated by our fucking deranged president.

Sorkin does a halfway decent job of relitigating those ideas through our unfortunate timeline and showing the hard work that goes into an investigation of this kind. But because the movie is basically two characters, Horwitz slowly pulling information out of a source who already knows most of it, there just isn’t much inherent drama. The story jumps between 2019, 2020, and 2021 without offering any larger shape. If anything, those jumps underscore how little story there is. Too often it feels like Sorkin going back through a newspaper, underlining headlines, and saying, “Remember this? Remember how fucked up this was?”

With more life to the direction, the screenwriting sins might be easier to forgive. Instead Sorkin’s shortcomings as a writer are amplified by direction that has no conviction of its own. Everything feels tame, expected, obvious. The cinematography has that slick, vaguely Netflixian sheen where everything is technically competent but fundamentally lifeless. The blocking is weirdly artificial, as though Sorkin doesn’t entirely understand how people move through rooms or use their hands. Scenes exist to deliver dialogue and information, with almost nothing happening visually to complicate, contradict, or deepen what’s being said.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7 ‘ directed by Aaron Sorkin and starring Sacha Baron Cohen]

More damningly, so much of this feels derivative of better versions of this exact movie. Sorkin knows the grammar of the prestige investigative thriller, and actively seeks to prove out his deep movie buff bona fides, but directing one requires more than approximating the rhythms and images of All the President’s Men, Spotlight, or, most unfortunately for him, The Social Network. There’s no sense of discovery in the construction of The Social Reckoning. No image or sequence that could only have been conceived for this movie. It’s the antithesis of art in that way: not bad because it’s incompetent, but because it’s assembled entirely from received ideas about what a serious movie about serious journalism is supposed to look like.

The score from Alexandre Desplat is the clearest representation of the problem. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ disruptive electronic work for The Social Network didn’t just accompany Fincher’s images, it changed how we experienced them because it felt new and untamed, making the creation of Facebook feel ominous before the characters understood what they were unleashing. Here, earnest piano cues arrive to tell us exactly how seriously we’re supposed to take everything. One broke boundaries. The other exists entirely within them.

Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg as a malignant automaton, which grates against Jesse Eisenberg’s earlier rendering, where at least some humanity was discoverable, even as he was trying to hide it away in a hoodie. Here there’s none, only someone so obsessed with marginal gains in users and shareholder value that he’ll forsake any shred of civic duty or decency. Zuckerberg presents himself as a “free speech absolutist,” a phrase many fascistic technocrats love to cloak themselves in, arguing that Facebook’s duty is simply to provide the public square, though he comes across more like a Palpatine-esque supervillain.

The Social Reckoning does a decent job at selling why that absolutist argument collapses upon the slightest interrogation. The algorithms serve up divisive and patently false content because anger sells. Users are more likely to react to and repost inflammatory material, so increasing engagement means feeding them more of it. The result is greater participation in hate groups, hyperpartisanship, and a degradation of what democratizing speech is supposed to mean. The town-square argument falls apart when the square itself boosts the loudest voices. It’s the equivalent of giving one guy in the 1400s a loudspeaker while everyone else is forced by law to whisper. It falls apart further when the platform quietly censors negative comments under Mark’s own posts.

White is good here. His talents are served by a hard-nosed reporter who might not understand the technical aspects of his beat but whose old-school doggedness gets him through. It’s hardly a performance he’ll be remembered for, though that’s not his fault. Madison is solid too, and the pair have decent chemistry. Yet even they feel strangely alien inside Sorkin’s construction, trapped between naturalistic performances and dialogue that insists everyone speak in immaculately constructed rhetorical volleys designed to interrupt and upstage. Too often conversations become oratorical sparring matches, and eventually we stop caring who wins because the whole thing is so grating.

For all its failings, there is righteous anger coursing through The Social Reckoning, and a legitimate reason for this story to exist. The decisions made inside Facebook’s offices percolated outward through the general populace, radicalizing users, rewarding outrage, and giving a handful of technocrat egotists extraordinary influence over what billions of people saw and believed to be true. That’s worth revisiting, and there’s probably a good movie to be made of it. The problem isn’t that The Social Network didn’t need a sequel. It’s that Aaron Sorkin shouldn’t have been the sole delivery system for it.

After all, his film is ultimately a screed for content moderation. Facebook built an enormously powerful platform, discovered what generated engagement, and desperately needed guardrails around the people deciding how that machinery should operate. There’s a lesson for Hollywood in there somewhere. Sorkin can be an effective writer, but he’s preachy, sanctimonious, and incapable of resisting the urge to celebrate his own cleverness. Pair him with a filmmaker like Fincher and those impulses get sanded down and made electric. Leave him to his own devices and you get whatever the hell The Social Reckoning is trying to be. Maybe the real social reckoning is accepting that Hollywood could use a few guardrails of its own: stop letting Aaron Sorkin direct Aaron Sorkin movies.

CONCLUSION: Aaron Sorkin fails to inject ‘The Social Reckoning’ with anything resembling craftsmanship in this preachy, if righteously angry, followup to the brilliant David Fincher film. It tries to stand on the shoulders of giants and call itself tall.

C-