Among the many things David Fincher’s The Social Network gave us back in 2010 – countless memes, one of the greatest teaser trailers of all time, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ arrival as a composing duo for the ages – was a sense that tech wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg might just be a bad actor. Naturally one would be suspicious that a social media empire founded because an unpopular Harvard student wanted to rank his female classmates never had pure intentions, but for a brief period, that was the lie that Facebook sold the world. The website wanted to connect people. Fincher’s film, built on a genuinely excellent script by Aaron Sorkin, felt like a molotov lobbed into the heart of Silicon Valley. With every new revelation about the rot at the core of the tech industry, the film feels more and more like it captured not only the zeitgeist, but a sense of what was yet to come. Sixteen years later, Zuckerberg’s outsized influence on the world has been proven; his company’s products have changed the world. Often not for the better.
It makes sense that someone might want to pick up the story that ended with Zuckerberg becoming the world’s youngest billionaire, though Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg, whose perfectly pitched portrayal of an petulant boy genius anchored The Social Network, declined to be involved, leaving it to Aaron Sorkin to pick up the mantel, fully leaning into what is probably his greatest achievement as a screenwriter by titling the film The Social Reckoning. It’s always a risk to evoke a masterpiece, but it does seem like a very Sorkin thing to do; he is an artist with little sense of self-preservation.
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Set around a decade after the close of Fincher’s film, Sorkin picks up with the story of data scientist turned whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked documents in 2021 that proved Facebook was actively participating in the spread of misinformation regarding Covid and global politics, allowing cartels and human traffickers to openly operate on the platform, promoting hate groups and targeting vulnerable teenagers through advertising. The dramatisation of Haugen (Mikey Madison) working with Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) in 2019/20 is set against Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) in early 2021, preparing to testify in front of congress regarding social media’s role in spreading misinformation with coaching from crisis publicist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku). This is the first area of trouble Sorkin runs into; he reorients the film’s timeline around the events in Washington on January 6th 2021, when in reality Zuckerberg’s hearing took place in March and Horwitz’s articles about Facebook were published in September of the same year. While biographical filmmaking does sometimes play fast and loose with the truth, it is an inexcusable choice to make in a film where facts and misinformation are the entire heart of the matter, particularly given that the entire reason Sorkin does it is so he can include an overwrought, borderline comical recreation of the Capitol riots.
Similarly, casting 27-year-old Madison to play 42-year-old Haugen serves no purpose beyond mobilising the Anora fanbase. Her characterisation as a quirky, socially awkward, neurotic Woman in STEM has costume in place of character; opposite her Allen White appears quite gormless as Horwitz, constantly relying on his two interns to do his work for him while repeatedly making sexist jibes against the female one which feel like Newsroom zingers that got left on the cutting room floor. It’s not a flattering portrayal; by contrast, Strong’s curiously timid take on Zuckerberg, of which there is far less than the trailer implied, feels pitying rather than biting. This is The Social Reckoning’s chief issue; its flat characterisations do little to bring a leaden, fact-heavy story to life. There are lots of long, meaty conversations about the extent of Facebook’s many, many misdeeds, and Sorkin does not manage to temper these with interesting storytelling or great directing. It feels like a diluted version of a far better film, down to its watery colour palette and Alexandre Desplat’s score which is trying very hard to not rip off Reznor and Ross.
Perhaps the most egregious element of The Social Reckoning is the film’s title, which suggests Zuckerberg and Facebook had to answer for their crimes. It won’t be lost on anyone who’s read the news in the past five years that precious little came of Haugen’s leak; materially all that changed was Facebook was renamed Meta and began hawking glasses with spy cameras in them. The world shrugged its shoulders and kept turning. The same will happen when they see this limp film, which plays as if All The President’s Men ended with Nixon still happily twiddling his thumbs in office. It’s not Aaron Sorkin’s fault that Zuckerberg and Facebook have seen little in the way of consequences, but it’s certainly his fault he made a film which tries to suggest otherwise.