‘The Social Reckoning’ Review: [Clicks Angry Face Emoji]

To paraphrase one of the best lines in The Social Network: If Aaron Sorkin had created The Social Network, he would have created The Social Network.

Instead, he created The Social Reckoning. Sure, Sorkin wrote the screenplay for the 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook. He even won an Oscar for his script. But The Social Reckoning makes it clear that as good as Sorkin’s Social Network screenplay was, it was David Fincher’s direction that made that story sing. Serving as his own director in The Social Reckoning, Sorkin hasn’t made a good movie, but he did produce one hell of a commercial for David Fincher’s talents.

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Fincher, for example, would never have made a film about a bunch of journalists and their sources sitting in nondescript conference rooms and hotel rooms talking about algorithms and charts for two hours. He would not have structured a movie to build to a “shocking” climax where the heroes are thunderstruck at the discovery of … a fact about Facebook that was painfully obvious to most viewers long before one of its employees named Frances Haugen exposed some of the company’s shady practices.

As The Social Reckoning begins, Frances (Anora Oscar winner Mikey Madison) is a model Facebook employee. Or at least, she would be a model employee at a responsible company that actually cared about how its products impacted their users. Frances loves Facebook, and believes in the work she does as part of the company’s Civic Integrity Team, which roots out abuse and misinformation on the platform.

Civic Integrity Team members like Frances took an oath to put the public ahead of Facebook — a noble but not necessarily profitable tact for a company that, at least in Sorkin’s script, puts money above everything else. Frances tries to voice her concerns about Facebook’s direction at town halls; instead of more accountability, her bosses shut down the Civic Integrity Team.

Eventually her attempts to improve the situation through official corporate channels get stymied one too many times. When a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jeff Horwitz (The Bear Emmy winner Jeremy Allen White) reaches out to Frances on LinkedIn, she decides to speak to him off the record about her team and a recent change to the website’s all-important algorithm.

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Sorkin cuts back and forth between their investigation, which mostly takes place in 2019 and 2020, and one day in 2021 where Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong, taking over for The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) prepares to testify before Congress. With his stiff posture, placid face, and stilted speech patterns, Strong’s Zuckerberg doesn’t bear a strong emotional resemblance to Eisenberg’s interpretation of the tech mogul. That sort of suits The Social Reckoning; it’s as if years under the thrall of the almighty algorithm have gradually leached whatever emotions this man once had and left behind this unfeeling robot. (It’s left to his crisis PR team, including Wunmi Mosaku and Bill Burr, to coach Zuck about how to appear human on the witness stand.)

But there’s nothing much more to learn about Zuckerberg or Facebook in The Social Reckoning beyond that already apparent observation. Sorkin tries to gussy up his staid, talky script with lots of the back-and-forth banter that’s defined his career since the days of Sports Night. Whatever his other flaws as a filmmaker, he’s still got too good of an ear for this sort of repartee for The Social Reckoning not to possess a couple of fun moments as Frances and Jeff rake Facebook’s muck, and Zuckerberg’s team frantically try to contain the damage.

But that’s the only trick Sorkin’s got. Unlike Fincher’s bold camera moves and angles, Sorkin and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (who also shot The Social Network) rely on repetitive close-ups in the film’s ceaseless dialogue scenes. There isn’t a single visual moment that stands out; The Social Reckoning could easily be staged as a play, and sometimes feels like it was written to be one. (Let’s not even get started on what a sonic downgrade this film from The Social Network, with a turgid score by Alexandre Desplat in lieu of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ award-winning music.)

There are zero sparks between the pained Madison and the deadpan White, although it’s hard to fault their lack of chemistry when so many of their scenes involve Frances explaining complex concepts of computer science while Jeff (a Luddite who doesn’t have a Facebook account and can’t use his car’s GPS) acts confused — with occasional digressions for outrageously dated pop-culture references. (Did this young Wall Street Journal reporter really try to convince her not to abandon their quest to expose her employer by lecturing her about obscure Frank Capra movies?)

What The Social Reckoning makes clear, if only in retrospect, is that The Social Network wasn’t really about Facebook. The company’s origins were a backdrop for a compelling character study of a megalomaniac, and a gripping story about ambition, class, greed, power, and the dog-eat-dog world of venture capitalism. The Social Reckoning is about Facebook, full stop. It’s about people talking about Facebook, yelling about Facebook, and looking forlorn at computer screens while contemplating the deleterious effect of Facebook on our society. Even Zuckerberg, the most interesting figure in both films, is reduced to a relatively small supporting role. (And when he shows up, it’s so he can … talk more about Facebook.)

You won’t get an argument from me about any of their findings. What I take issue with are those findings’ presentation, which make The Social Reckoning play less like a Social Network sequel than a very special episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. Most of the film is literally old news, and its anguished, scolding ending made me more angry at the filmmakers than its intended target.

RATING: 4/10