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Prior to its 2010 release, a much-held suspicion about “The Social Network” was that it was too soon for a film about Facebook. In a way, it was. At a time when most of us were still avidly adding friends on the platform,
it felt like the story wasn’t yet complete. But that’s what made David Fincher’s pristinely crafted, coolly perceptive film so riveting, and so urgent: A compelling origin story, it also sounded a clear warning that Facebook, as benignly as we may have used it, wasn’t itself benign, and the man behind it, even less so. 16 years later, with “The Social Reckoning,” the previous film’s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is out to tell us that he was right all along. The difference, this time, is we already know that.
Where “The Social Network” came to feel, if anything, even more exhilaratingly prescient with the passage of time, a certain air of “too little too late” hangs over “The Social Reckoning.” A diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination of how Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, well, lost face, it covers events between the years 2019 and 2021 — and winds up playing as a veritable period piece, so drastically have the tech-wars stakes shifted and expanded in the half-decade since then.
Sorkin’s film covers, in measured procedural detail, the story of how Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), with the aid of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), uncovered awful truths behind the platform’s algorithmic support of extremist political groups and its complicity in Instagram’s detrimental effects on young users — as methodically detailed, among other horrors, in Horwitz’s series of exposés titled “The Facebook Files.” It extends to Haugen’s powerful testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and ties things off there, on a rare, rousing instance of truth being spoken to power. (With a side cheer for the value of old-school shoe-leather journalism.)
But if many viewers will be largely caught up on what happens in “The Social Reckoning,” they’ll also be au fait with what has happened since — and in the year 2026, with Facebook still an unregulated hive of toxic misinformation, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the game on all fronts, the film’s note of stopgap triumph is quaint at best, and hardly satisfying. It’s a reminder that “The Social Network” was both Sorkin’s best writing achievement and, with its dominant note of queasy, unresolved anxiety, his least characteristic; a fine fit for Fincher’s particular brand of sharp, shadowy mood-mongering, here conspicuous by its absence. The new film sporadically nods to its predecessor’s dark, charged quiet, but with Sorkin in the director’s chair this time, the speechifying idealist of “The West Wing” and “The Triumph of the Chicago 7” prevails. We aren’t buying it.
It begins with an isolated, fictional prologue that, give or take some updated technology, recalls Paul Haggis’ “Crash” in its button-pushing. A young white woman, Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), is approached by Black and Asian police officers on the side of a busy road, as she waits for the AAA to attend to her broken-down vehicle; she reacts hostilely to their initial offer of assistance, and the encounter rapidly escalates into a racialized confrontation, as she hurls racist hate speech at the cops, filming them on her phone all the while. Shortly afterwards, she uploads the footage to Voice of Reason, a white-supremacist Facebook group, where it’s spotted by Haugen, a junior product manager on Facebook’s short-lived civic integrity team. The twist? Kayleigh is a former friend of hers, and a former liberal to boot.
Clearly calculated to sidestep any latter-day discourse about police corruption, it’s a punchy but schematic opening salvo, boldfacing the issue of how social media has the power to radicalize moderate minds. The year is 2019, more than halfway into Trump’s first term; Haugen, charismatically drawn by Madison as a GenZ scrapper who still believes in changing the world, perhaps shouldn’t be as shocked as she is by the video. Or by the indifference of her superiors to her meticulously gathered data on how 64% of extremist group joiners on Facebook were driven there by the platform’s recommendation tool, among other grim stats. Facebook’s professed commitment to “civic integrity,” she learns, is mere public-relations window-dressing: When, in a meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), her team proposes simple safeguarding measures that may cause a 1% drop in engagement, you can guess his answer.
Someone who is interested in her findings, of course, is Horwitz, a former political journo newly appointed to the WSJ’s tech beat — and still convincing his icy new boss (Betty Gilpin, of course) that tech is politics in this day and age. Recruiting an initially hesitant Haugen as his inside source helps prove his point; the bulk of the film centers on the push-pull dynamic between the bristly, impassioned, hyper-online young woman and the old-before-his-time luddite reporter, each of whom knows a few hard truths about the world that the other has yet to learn. A kind of sexless quasi-romcom, it’s engagingly played by Madison and White — who gives Horwitz, written at best as half a character, some weary, baggy-eyed hangdog sincerity — but it all feels hopelessly old-fashioned relative to the milieu in which they find themselves.
Sorkin’s script zigzags between their joint investigation and Zuckerberg’s highly defensive preparation for a 2021 Congressional testimony — the scope of which is disrupted by the Capitol riots, as he’s placed under growing pressure to suspend the outgoing insurrectionist President from Facebook. It’s a hothouse setup, but it never really hits home, in part because Sorkin’s writing can’t resist slick, combative comedy patter — Zuckerberg’s foils this time are Bill Burr’s Charlie, a former Facebook employee turned skeptical consultant, and Wunmi Mosaku’s tacitly exasperated crisis manager Raya — and in part because Strong’s amusingly alien interpretation of the founder is so hard to access. In “The Social Network,” Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly essayed Zuckerberg as a boy sociopath, all nerves exposed as he built his armor; here, as embodied by Strong, he’s reached final form, emotionally constipated to an absurdist degree. There may be some truth to that; dramatically, however, he’s a dead end.
Which, unfortunately, goes for much of “The Social Reckoning,” a film that maps out the world as we more or less know it, or knew it at the time, but has no reserves of untold tragedy, feeling or surprise. It’s capably mounted, even if Sorkin remains a televisual stylist at heart: Despite working with the original “Social Network” DP Jeff Cronenweth, he has nothing approaching Fincher’s visual ingenuity, his ability to locate tactile, haunting atmosphere in the sterile, textureless lairs of tech bros and newspapermen alike. Alexandre Desplat’s score, meanwhile, toggles awkwardly between a pale imitation of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ melancholic lo-fi electronica in the previous film, and the ennobling orchestral themes that mark the filmmaker’s happier place.
In “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin mourns what Facebook, once an imperfect platform that brought friends together, has become. But his film, in its own less serious way, itself feels a downgrade from what we had before: less human, less candid, less connected.
