Review | The revolution might not start with a ‘Social Reckoning’
Illustration by Lexi Forman, Cartoonist.
Facebook has changed a lot since launching in 2004. Your friends were your friends. Your feed was chronological. If you scrolled long enough, you could reach the end and get on with the rest of your day.
Somewhere along the way, it morphed into something a whole lot scarier.
I could prattle on about how Facebook has become a breeding ground of online extremism, unchecked misinformation and AI slop, but writer-director Aaron Sorkin is going to do a much better job of it. “The Social Reckoning” is a pseudosequel companion piece to 2010’s “The Social Network,” both written by Sorkin. But if “Network” is about Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg asserting absolute control over his new doomsday device of a website, then “Reckoning” is about him starting to lose his grip over his dominion as the bomb starts to tick down.
When “The Social Network” came out, Facebook was sitting at a cool 500 million users. Today, that’s 2.9 billion. That’s an absurd number by any metric, and Sorkin’s script does an excellent job highlighting just how dangerous that is. Framed through The Wall Street Journal’s series of Facebook Files articles, the film follows Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen (Mikey Madison) and investigative tech reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) as they uncover how the social media platform became a hotbed of fake news and partisan radicalization.
Quite frankly, it’s an impressive and sturdy investigative drama, and Sorkin’s rhythmic sense of storytelling delivers one hell of a tight script. This is a renowned playwright and screenwriter flexing his chops, filled to the brim with clever wordplay and back-and-forths you could convince me are written in iambic pentameter à la Shakespeare. No one else but Aaron Sorkin could get a guffaw out of mixing up “conscious” and “conscientious,” but he manages the impossible. Every word and every beat of this story, bouncing around from 2019 to 2021 at the drop of a hat, works on paper.
But alas, a movie is not made on paper, as much as Sorkin might want it to be. Gone is the measured confidence of “The Social Network”’s director David Fincher who gave that movie a moment-to-moment kineticism that’s sorely lacking here. Sorkin delivers a self-assured and confident script but keeps second guessing himself as a director. Fincher’s creative flourishes embellish his films’ script; Sorkin’s feel arbitrary. Some of the choices he makes here come across as downright goofy in their execution, not fully committing to the bit and detracting from the bold statements the rest of the film is trying to make.
This isn’t necessarily Sorkin trying to ape Fincher, however. There’s no way he could live up to that standard of precision. But this is in fact Sorkin trying to do a Frank Capra picture (a director whose work is directly referenced throughout the film), which is frankly a lot harder to pull off.
Tragically, “The Social Reckoning” will likely end up remembered as the not-quite-as-good version of many other films. It will be the Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie not quite as good as “The Social Network,” the tech company doomsday film not quite as relevant as the upcoming OpenAI-focused “Artificial” and, perhaps most of all, the sincere Capra-esque drama not quite as sincere and memorable as “Coyote vs. Acme.”
But this is by no means a bad movie. It just is nowhere near the best possible movie it could have been.
Anchored in strong performances from Madison and White, the investigation at the heart of “The Social Reckoning” is an engrossing David and Goliath story for the modern age. Almost like an updated “All the President’s Men” substituting the Watergate scandal for social media’s effects on mental health, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 insurrection. If the ins and outs of navigating corporate NDAs and piecing together the implications of changes to the Facebook algorithm amidst years of tremendous global upheaval sounds interesting to you, there are many journalistic thrills to be found here.
If nothing else, this will serve as a well thought-out historical document of, for lack of a less cliched term, unprecedented times. Even if Facebook (now Meta) started fact-checking its content even less and Mark Zuckerberg (portrayed by an exceptionally lizardlike Jeremy Strong) is still the leader of one of the world’s largest technological empires, it can’t be understated how important the work of Haugen and Horwitz was in holding Silicon Valley’s megalomaniacs accountable. It’s a level of bravery and commitment that’s worthy of celebration, even if that celebration is ultimately a “just okay” movie.
At the end of the day, this one might not knock your socks off. But it’s a competent and earnestly made investigative thriller made by and about people who really care about the story they’re telling. If that sounds like a good time, or if you’re over the age of 45 and remember when your Facebook feed was chronological, you’re gonna love this one.
