The Social Reckoning Review

The Social Reckoning opens in theaters on October 9.

Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for scripting The Social Network, returns to exploring the sins of Facebook with The Social Reckoning, a sequel companion piece to that David Fincher-directed 2010 film that feels late to its own party.

The Sorkin-directed film chronicles how Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) collaborated with Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) to reveal the social media company’s dirtiest laundry in the 2021 multi-article series The Facebook Files. Thanks to the information and documents that Frances leaked to Jeff, the Journal claimed to expose how the platforms owned by mogul Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong, stepping in for Jesse Eisenberg) knowingly made life shittier for everybody so they could stay profitable. It’s more complex than that but that’s the gist.

Despite being sharply written and engagingly performed by a great cast, The Social Reckoning never reaches the dramatic heights of its 2010 predecessor. The Social Network was a more personal story about ambitious young friends dreaming big and ferociously falling out. It was a story where people confront each other face to face.

The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, is a whistleblower/journalist movie where the main conflict is between a hero who is only in the same room with the villain once and never speaks to them. Sorkin’s script is entertaining and features his signature punchy, smarmy dialogue that actors love to say, but many of these characters feel like functionaries.

We don’t learn much about Jeff except that he’s ignorant about tech but is a good reporter. White is decent here but not particularly compelling. Madison’s nerdy Frances has more dimension, as her occasional mean streak helps mask her own social awkwardness. She’s a sympathetic protagonist even if her life beyond Facebook, like Jeff’s beyond the Journal, remains largely unknown. (The scene where she is on a date with a finance bro is pretty funny, though.)

On the Facebook side, Jeremy Strong isn’t in the film as much as you might expect, but he possesses the screen every moment he’s on it. He plays Zuckerberg as the creepiest android that Weyland-Yutani ever built, a humanoid construct missing some key components that prevent him from fully functioning. The film’s stellar ensemble also includes solid turns by Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, and Billy Magnussen.

As much as his dialogue can crackle, Sorkin the director struggles to make The Social Reckoning pop. The film plays like a stage production that was adapted for the screen but without capturing the electricity you’d have felt when it was on Broadway. It’s competently directed but rarely rousing. Even when the music is telling you to be roused.

Despite Alexandre Desplat’s melodramatic score pounding the viewer over the head to tell us how important Frances’ congressional testimony is — the film is well aware of its Frank Capra aspirations as the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington director gets name-checked in one amusing scene — we know we still live in a world where Facebook’s tactics were exposed and … life just went on.

It’s depressing, I know, but that’s the sad truth. Even Zuckerberg’s tenure as the face of tech villainy has mostly waned with Sam Altman and Elon Musk — both of whom also have movies about them coming out soon — now dominating the cultural conversation.

In some ways, it’s not the film’s fault that the outrage it’s asking the viewer to feel lacks urgency. We live in a time where there’s at least one or two news stories every day that spark outrage. It’s exhausting, so asking the viewer to reconnect with issues that polarized people five to seven years ago — the film brings us back to the glory days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6th insurrection — is a lot, especially when its ultimate message isn’t exactly new or shocking: Social media, specifically Facebook, is a monster that divides people, makes life worse, spreads misinformation and earns a pretty penny off all of that misery.