Let’s address the broken record out of the gate: Aaron Sorkin can’t direct! Despite being one of our finest screenwriters working today, he can never translated his thought provoking ideas properly on the big screen whenever he is given the full director’s chair. A Few Good Men, The American President, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, and of course, The Social Network all benefitted because Rob Reiner (RIP!), Danny Boyle, Bennett Miller, and of course, David Fincher were behind the camera and NOT him. He has a directorial vision that isn’t so much tryhard or style over substance but having ZERO sense of tryhard or ZERO sense of style or substance to speak off, just constantly delivering motion pictures that are visually flat despite hard hitting material, containing clunky direction with massively talented actors forced to carry their own weight, and constantly going to class at the Joss Whedon school of characters being overly clever and quippy just because. Every time he is given a chance at directing, Sorkin ALWAYS gets exposed butt ass naked off his own personal flaws as an entertainment creative. For all the redeemable qualities that the scripts for Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7 contained, both films would have benefitted GREATLY if literally anyone else was behind the camera.
And I don’t think there’s a better place to test that hypothesis of Sorkin’s own limits as a director than with his newest directorial feature The Social Reckoning, the spiritual successor (NOT the OTHER S word!) to 2010’s The Social Network that dramatizes the 2021 Facebook leaks by the whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz. However, this time around, Mr. Fincher is not directing as he is too busy working with Quentin Tarantino, with his spin-off of his (supposed) second-to-last film he will ever make, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. That leaves only Aaron himself to carry the baton that he helped start but has been left alone to do it all on his own yet again. And even more so than his other directed films, The Social Reckoning displays Aaron Sorkin flaws harder than ever!
Premise: Facebook engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and The Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) blow the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.
It’s easy to see why Sorkin was interested in returning to the world of Facebook and revisiting the legacy of Meta Head/Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg given the current political climate and how more critical social media has played a role in our lives now. In 2010, Facebook felt like it was living up to it’s intended goals, creating a social network service designed to bring people together from all walks of life, regardless if you met a person in real life or on the internet, to a create a much bigger and more unifying world that you couldn’t before. While there were negative side effects of it, the pros almost certainly outweigh any major cons.
Fast forward to 16 years later and that special, optimistic nature of Facebook is long gone, replaced by nonstop cynicism, tiresome rage bait and “hate” speech, and the constant spreading of “fake” news left and right. And despite all the complaining and acknowledgement of the obvious elephant in the room over the years, we still find ourselves stuck in a constant loop that is this bleak era of the internet we are currently living in because well….we have no where else to go.
To give credit to Sorkin, he has no desire of repeating the same notes he did back in 2010. In The Social Network, that not only fully explored the origins of how Facebook came to be and the bumpy as hell road to it’s creation but also the massive benefits that would come for it. In The Social Reckoning, it’s all about the massive downsides that have come with Facebook and how exactly it has operated to being the negative cesspool it has become. And with a writer that is known from using his own wits and intelligence to craft multilayered, satisfying scripts, what better person to tackle how bleak Facebook and the internet as a whole has become throughout the past 16 years other than him. While making a follow-up on that angle makes perfect sense in theory, the execution of it leaves plenty to be desired.
The Social Reckoning isn’t so much interested in exploring the effects on the mental health and radicalization of folks who use Facebook on a daily basis but more so of the ins and outs of how it became to be. This main narrative thread is carried by our two leads with Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz, played by Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White respectively. Frances is interested in getting to bottom as to why Facebook has become so hateful after seeing her friend get radicalized by supposed far-right, white extremist internet groups despite being a very progressive liberal at some point in her life. Jeff takes her under his wing (So much so that he has her wearing incredibly revealing dresses whenever she comes over to his apartment to give the impression they are on a date to his neighbors!). He is a Wall Street Journal reporter that covers the political landscape and believes current day factors have contributed to the rise of constant negativity on Facebook. Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg is in here too (played by the shockingly flat Jeremy Strong) because he attended a senate hearing about fake news and misinformation constantly being spread on Facebook after a certain controversial election, which the meeting also happens to take place on the exact same day as a certain controversial event that took place in our nation’s capital.
The underlining problem here is that the journey to discovering the extremely flawed algorithms of Facebook is not particularly interesting. I don’t really care how Facebook was operated to be the negative cesspool that is now, I’m only interested in seeing the consequences of it from it’s daily users and how it has affected them mentally. The handful scenes we do get of seeing the folks affected by Facebook and the desire for more internet restrictions plays out like comically over-the-top Saturday Night Live sketches and the cinematic equivalent of Boomer parents demanding for the internet to be banned because they can’t do their damn jobs themselves of keeping their kids off of it. Yes, it’s sad that kids get bullied on a daily basis on the internet, maybe the parents should supervise them to keep them away from any kind of cyberbullying.
The whole experience comes crashing down in the final act of the film, where we see the full events of January 6th, 2021 unfold (Yeah, spoiler alert but it’s already been revealed that the film contains it!). Even if you take away the fact that the film commits the cardinal sin of inserting it’s own OC to tie into this horrific day for no reason or how the whole sequence of events is shot like a Sydney Sweeney sports gambling commercial, the film seems to be under the impression that the results of January 6th is in large part because Zuckerberg couldn’t be bothered to censor or fact-check Facebook “enough”. It’s not the algorithms or plain extremism of political ideology that caused these events to happen, it’s because Facebook was allowing too much free speech on it’s platform and the government should have more eyes and ears about what is said on the internet. Aaron, you do know that protests and riots have occurred BEFORE the rise of the internet, right?!?! I get you don’t like Mark (I don’t either!) but come on!
This is suppose to act as the major culmination of the film but it comes off more as Sorkin spinning his narrative wheels all willy nilly, perfectly displaying how this time period of fake news and misinformation is still going on with no end in sight and no solution to present. It’s even more laughable by the time the credits roll and we get notified of the events that transpired after January 6th, only to be reminded that no lessons were learned at all, little to no consequences of Facebook and the rioters occurred, and we are still living through the aftermath of that event five years later. It makes you wonder why Sorkin even bothered to make the film at all if the main points that are brought up constantly throughout the film ends up contradicting itself by the end.
It’s not a totally unwatchable experience. Much like prior written and directed Sorkin films, it does move along at a nice, breezy pace and contains enough zingers that has become a staple of his filmography that helps carry the entire picture. Despite the film constantly jumping from multiple different timeframes throughout, I never felt lost or confused, largely because there is always a reminder after each scene as to what year each new scene takes place, which surprisingly flows much better than you would think.
Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White do good work here, having the most engaging banter and material throughout the film. It doesn’t play into traditional couple dynamics or even working relationship tropes but just two determined individuals trying to bring something into light that could cause them both deeply. Bill Burr stands out greatly as Charlie Garrigan, a former Facebook investor and member of Zuckerberg’s legal counsel, even if a majority of the scenes is largely takes place in that exact senate hearing, with the same tiresome “fact check” sequences with Zuckerberg that only work because Burr is so believable in everything he’s in.
Speaking of which, Jeremy Strong does not work as Mark Zuckerberg whatsoever. Removed from the charming sociopath nature that Jessie Eisenberg brought in The Social Network, Strong ends up playing Zuckerberg as the most straightforward tech bro figure you could possibly imagine, with nothing standing out from your usual straightforward tech bro figure. This may not be entirely Strong’s fault as Sorkin was clearly NOT expecting Eisenberg to step down from his game changing role as the world’s three or fourth most infamous billionaire but he doesn’t do himself any wonders here.
The Social Reckoning is certainly a film to admire on the surface, having the balls to address a major cancer that has polluted internet and political discourse throughout the past decade plus is a genius one. But none of the material is put to good use, with it falling into the same trappings that prior directed Sorkin films does (The score by Alexandre Desplat is disturbingly flat btw!) and no unique perspective to fall back on here that makes it worth backing despite it’s subject matter. Much like with Digger, I might agree with what the film has to say but that doesn’t mean I have to like the film because of it.
I suppose if you just want a film that will make you angry at tech bro billionaires for two hours and have you leaving the theater raising your fists, there are certainly worse alternatives than The Social Reckoning. But considering we got a Elon Musk documentary in theaters now and Artificial on it’s way to theaters in a couple of months to give you that exact fall, you might just want to log out for this one.
And NO, I am NOT watching that four-hour long Elon Musk documentary! I have more important things in life to spend four hours of my life on!
