The Magic is All Gone: The Social Reckoning Review
The Social Network is one of the greatest movies since the turn of the millennium.
The Social Reckoning looks like a movie made only for streaming (and even still, David Fincher’s Netflix The Killer is significantly better).
The comparison between the two movies is unavoidable. Both written by Aaron Sorkin and shot by Jeff Cronenweth, the filmmaking and marketing team strongly wish for the viewer to consider The Social Reckoning a rightful successor to The Social Network. Yet the two films intersect only when Sorkin attempts, unsuccessfully, to recreate its predecessor’s most iconic images. For example, Fincher places a deflated Jesse Eisenberg in the empty office, where the lonelier-than-ever protagonist uses the platform he built to search for human connection. Sorkin, on the other hand, places Jeremy Strong in his Bond villain office, where the banal wall of codes autoscrolls like The Matrix. Simultaneously, Alexandre Desplat fruitlessly tries to replicate Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ability to capture the lonely exhilaration of collegiate ambition, of the intoxicating sense that something immense might be conjured.
Sorkin’s lack of aesthetic sensibility also seeps through the screen. The shots are as soulless as the corporate murals lining the offices of the very companies the film criticizes. Where its predecessor used Futura and Klavika to echo the electric novelty of early social media, Sorkin’s ugly timeline and chapter markers are both spiritually plagiarizing and also a crutch to his script’s inability to delineate different storylines.
The film’s characters equally suffer from a lack of depth. Instead of the insecure, vain, smart-smartass who built himself a castle to hide inside, Zuckerberg is recast as an archetype stripped of any complexities, immobilized by greed and pressure from a company too big to stop growing. He dictates his decisions loudly to his staff not because he desperately wants something, but because Sorkin needs to expound on what technical terms like M.S.I. (meaningful social engagements) mean. Jeremy Strong, trapped by the screenplay, gives us a lobotomized Zuckerberg—a one-note robot who can only switch from man-child rage to cartoonish evil. To manufacture the interiority that the writing fails to provide, Sorkin resorts to cheap visual shorthand that a more seasoned director would never employ: a twitching Jeremy Strong in a shallow focus black and white close up.
Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), meanwhile, are stuck in a limbo of maybe-romance. The dynamics are archetypal: She likes computers, and he can’t operate his car’s GPS (A detail that, in the post-screening Q&A that I attended, the real Horwitz denied). Their relationship has the architecture to be compelling but none of the chemistry required to sustain one.
The treatment of Madison’s character is more troubling. Haugen is reduced to a familiar Sorkin archetype: a nerd inhabiting an attractive body (think Sloan Sabbith in The Newsroom), with quirks—an inability to grasp basic humor, nervously cycling through flashcards—thrown at her in place of actual depth. In several scenes, she appears in revealing dresses, ostensibly to throw off surveillance of her clandestine meetings with Horwitz. Yet Sorkin’s broader treatment of gender suggests something less innocent. At one point, Horwitz defends himself by declaring, “Women say ‘mansplain’ when they lose an argument,” an oddly gratuitous line that feels less like something Horwitz would say than something Sorkin finds amusing.
The problems of this film do not end here. Sorkin’s overbearing didacticism fails to work. Perhaps in an attempt to confer on the film the heroic moral clarity and bustling journalistic urgency of something like the All the President’s Men, Sorkin name-drops Frank Capra, Carl Bernstein, and Bob Woodward. Yet, the references only make the comparison more embarrassing. Sorkin wants the moral righteousness of Woodward and Bernstein, but keeps writing Horwitz and Haugen like the leads of a meet-cute echoed in his television writings. The journalism portrayed here, unlike the real work of Horwitz and Haugen, never acquires the moral weight or procedural tension that the film tries to invoke.
Sorkin’s teaching does not work here because the revelations he presents as shocking have long since hardened into common knowledge. Everyone watching this film is acutely aware of the events of 2019 to 2021, of January 6th, of the “enshittifcation” of every one of Zuckerberg’s social media platforms. The cornball ending seems to imply that something might change, that journalism’s death might be postponed, that Facebook will become less of a force for bad.
Unfortunately, “The Facebook Files” is nothing like Watergate. It did not change the world; it did not even change the company. Some transgressors of January 6th have been pardoned. Meta is still a heap of hot garbage, while simultaneously taking the crown as one of the epicenters of AI detritus and scams. The Social Reckoning is nothing like Sorkin’s The Newsroom, in which the audience can hope for the existence of its “Quixotic” protagonists. Outside the world of Sorkin’s docudrama, we continue to witness the Meta story unfold in real time, and that reality is stranger, uglier, and altogether more damning.
The Social Reckoning opens in theaters on Friday, October 9.
Ray Wu is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Double Exposure. Three words to describe him are Talkative, During, Movies. He believes that either George Clooney or Tony Leung should play him in a biopic.