Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr
We all remember what we were doing when The Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz published his September 2021 report on Facebook's dodgy practices. It was an earth-shattering moment. How could Mark Zuckerberg, a man in whom we had all placed our trust, betray us so? I'll never forget my copy of the WSJ falling out of my limp hands as I realised everything I thought I knew about the world was an illusion. In that moment I knew how America felt when Watergate broke. My six-year-old daughter, Chelsea, looked at me with teary eyes and asked "Daddy, where do we go from here?" I knelt down to her eye level, wiped away her tears and reassured her, "Don't worry child, Aaron Sorkin will have the answers."
The Social Reckoning is a movie about the internet written by an old man who still uses a typewriter. Sorkin has previously dabbled in this world with his script for David Fincher's over-rated The Social Network. He wanted Fincher to return to direct this spiritual sequel, but I guess Fincher must have read the script and wisely declined. Jesse Eisenberg similarly refused to reprise his role as Zuckerberg. Instead we get Jeremy Strong, who plays the tech guru as though he's channelling Beaker from The Muppets.
The main focus this time isn't on Zuckerberg but on Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison, continuing the tradition of Oscar winning actresses immediately pivoting to garbage), a Facebook data engineer who turned whistleblower in 2019. Frustrated at her superiors' lack of interest in appeasing her fears regarding the social network's increasing association with misinformation and extremism, Frances contacts Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). As a believer in Facebook's potential for good (lol), Frances is initially reluctant to go all in and leak sensitive information to Horwitz, but she eventually decides to risk it all and go nuclear on Zuckerberg.
A second narrative strand sees Zuckerberg engage in a rehearsal for an upcoming congressional hearing in 2021. This single location subplot is essentially a play within a film, full of Sorkin's trademark liberal confirmation bias dialogue, with Bill Burr playing a fictional character as a mouthpiece for Sorkin and the world's centrist dads. The rehearsal is cut short by the breaking news of January 6th, at which point the movie goes full Sorkin, Alexandre Desplat's mawkish score channelling WG Snuffy Walden's pompous work on The West Wing. There is some half-baked drama concerning Zuckerberg's initial hesitancy in taking down an inflammatory post written by an author the film is too scared to call out by name, and Sorkin stages it as though Zuckerberg is Captain Jean-Luc Picard debating whether to fire on a Klingon Bird of Prey.
All of the heroic figures in The Social Reckoning seem oddly surprised to learn of Facebook's practices, despite the events of the movie occurring almost half a decade after Russiagate. The whole endeavour gives the impression that Sorkin wrote the script after overhearing a conversation among his grandkids, one he didn't understand but decided to run with regardless. As a middle-aged man, I found The Social Reckoning's representation of social media laughably cringey, so I can only imagine what younger viewers will make of it. A couple of scenes are hilariously awful in their execution. The movie opens with a racist meltdown that plays like an outtake that was considered too over the top for Crash. The most facepalm emoji-inducing moment comes when Haugen overhears parents discussing their daughter's online bullying. The scene is written and staged with all the realism of a political campaign ad.
For all his faults, Sorkin is still able to write crackling dialogue, and there is some fun to be had in the screwball-esque patter between Haugen and Horwitz, the former constantly mocking the latter's luddite mentality. It's Betty Gilpin as Horwitz's ball-breaking boss who embraces Sorkin-ese most readily though, and it's a shame she has so little screen time.
The Social Reckoning ends with a literal punch the air moment, suggesting Sorkin believes something was actually achieved by Haugen and Horwitz. The only people who would believe Horwitz's report had any real impact are the sort of liberal boomers who think "He's not getting out of this one" every time some "damning" news breaks about Trump. Ironically, the viewers most susceptible to The Social Reckoning are those aging Facebook users who believe everything they see.
The Social Reckoning is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 9th.
