Review: ‘The Social Reckoning’ zucks the life out of an important issue

When The Social Network was first announced, it seemed like a joke. Why would someone make a movie about this dumb website college kids used to post party pictures? Little did we know then that this wouldn’t be just a really well-made film, but that the whiny, entitled men it portrayed would come to define America. In the time since, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been linked to everything from ethnic cleansing to teen suicide. It makes sense that writer Aaron Sorkin would want to jump back in for another round of social networking hell, this time taking over directing duties from David Fincher. 

The Social Reckoning is sort of a sequel to The Social Network that tries to find a middle ground between the original film and a standalone adaptation centered around the Wall Street Journal 2021 story “The Facebook Files,” and Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal company documents. 

Original cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (who somehow filmed both Fight Club and the Melania movie) returns to create a visual throughline, though The Social Reckoning has a hazy, washed-out glow that wouldn’t be out of place in a made-for-streaming movie. Likewise, the marketing materials and the name itself clearly want to capitalize on the original movie. But besides Fincher, Jesse Eisenberg didn’t return as Mark Zuckerberg, and none of the other original cast members did; composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are deeply missed, and their sinister ambiance is replaced with a more generic cinematic score from Alexandre Desplat. 

The format, too, shifts to a journalistic thriller like Spotlight rather than the original’s dark psychological drama. Mikey Madison stars as Haugen, a data scientist on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, which is intended to be a semi-independent group within the company representing the interests of the site’s users, but, as seen in a tech dystopian meeting with Zuckerberg, is ignored and quickly discarded when they become too much of an internal nuisance and want to put safety ahead of maximizing user interaction. 

Haugen is personally alarmed after discovering that an acquaintance who was once a Bernie Sanders supporter was “radicalized” by the Facebook algorithm after finding her live-streaming a racist attack on black police officers to a fringe far-right Facebook group and, doing additional research, finds 64% of members of these groups were referred there by Facebook. Enter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a Luddite political reporter who loves old Hollywood films and musicals and is taking over the Facebook tech beat for the Wall Street Journal but can’t break into a closed-off Bay Area tech world he barely understands. 

The film’s scenes between Madison and White are fairly repetitive without the necessary danger or the thrills of putting the puzzle pieces together. Haugen already knows everything, while Horwitz knows nothing and just needs her to photograph internal documents, which she resists. Fortunately, Sorkin gives Madison space to shine in her first role after Anora and create a compelling portrait of a hyperintelligent woman pushed aside in the land of tech bros, who finds her strength and assertiveness the more she works with Horwitz. So while she’s stuck in a loop of sorts, Madison is still a joy to watch.  

In a separate narrative leading up to the release of “The Facebook Files,” Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) rehearses for upcoming congressional testimony as he’s coached by his legal counsel (Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners) and team, who try to make him look less robotic, even having him practice nodding and consistently failing to find the right tie for him. To contrast to Eisenberg, Strong mirrors Zuckerberg’s stiff mannerisms and flat affectations perfectly. Again, it’s not clear whether he’s supposed to play the same version of Zuckerberg as in The Social Network, or whether that even matters, but you can easily see Eisenberg’s character growing into a cold digital emperor ruling over a kingdom of either arrogant or scared yes-men. 

Both the Frances Haugen and Zuckerberg sections mostly use the same rhetorical battle style Sorkin is known for, and your enjoyment will depend on how much you like his work and how much you enjoy watching people verbally spar. Rather than feeling as forward-thinking as The Social Network, The Social Reckoning feels like the same kind of backward scolding as Sorkin’s short-lived HBO show The Newsroom, which showed the press how to handle real-world news stories after they had already happened. I’m no Sorkin expert, though, and if you’re not either, I’d say this feels like it would have worked better as a stage play than a cinematic experience. 

The most effective section is its prologue, subtitled “White Girl Wasted,” where two police officers pull up behind a woman with a flat tire waiting for AAA. One officer realizes she’s drunk, and what starts with the woman’s annoyance turns into the racist livestream that kickstarts Haugen’s internal investigation. Apart from a half-assed sequence where Haugen eats at a fancy restaurant next to a family whose child is being cyberbullied, this is the only moment where Sorkin gives us an indication of how Facebook has changed our world, a topic actually worth looking back on and investigating. Later, when he tries to tie this all into January 6th and the Pandora’s Box of horrors exposed in “The Facebook Files,” it feels ham-fisted and falls flat, even to someone who agrees that Facebook has changed our world for the worse. 

The Social Reckoning isn’t awful by any means; it’s the kind of movie that’s great to watch on a plane, where it doesn’t really matter that you’re viewing it on your phone in low resolution but still want something watchable and entertaining. But as an intended follow-up, whether directly or not, to a film that becomes more and more of a masterpiece over the years, this falls flat. It’s a limp postmortem with little interest in dissecting how society has been forever harmed by its subject. Worse still, it’s been handed to us at a time when we’re besieged by new tech overlords like Sam Altman or Palmer Luckey, who makes AI weapon systems that might actually destroy the world. Going after Zuckerberg like this just feels quaint in comparison.