Did the world really need a sequel to The Social Network? Given that we’ve been living in it for the last decade-plus, I’d wager there’s not a very good argument for one. Sure, one could say there’s value in reminding the general populace that social media is a cancerous tumor, terminally spreading through our broader culture. That’s the crowd that pays about as much attention to national events as it does to whatever streaming show it half-watches, phone in hand. Yes, there’s an argument that a movie like that has value.
But, #1, those people aren’t going to see this movie anyway. The Social Network came and went before the entire entertainment infrastructure changed, and even David Fincher hasn’t made a film for theaters in over a decade. The stiff, talky drama (Christopher Nolan-directed iterations aside) has been relegated to “I’ll catch it at home” status. And #2, even if the intended audience came in droves, this still isn’t the movie to make the case. It has to play as a sequel, and it takes misfired broadsides at a target whose relevance to the current moment is questionable at best.
Aaron Sorkin has spent years proving the rule that not all writers are cut out to be directors. Sure, The Trial of the Chicago 7, as a chamber drama, played to his talky strengths. But anything before or after? A continuing case of a good premise the film can’t justify.
Sorkin’s script uses a two-hander narrative divided into multiple chapters. In the frame story, Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong, looking like a ventriloquist dummy, per my partner) prepares for an upcoming Congressional hearing where he must extol the virtues of Section 230, the law that protects social media companies from being sued over content posted on their platforms. Meanwhile, his legal counsel (Wunmi Mosaku and Bill Burr) coach him on how best to handle needling questions and come off as more likeable in what will be an enormously scrutinized event. Intermittently, a literal on-screen timeline jumps back and forth between the 2021 frame narrative and the years leading up to it. There we meet Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) as he begins fishing among Facebook’s staff for a source on the company’s inner workings. He finds more than he could have imagined in Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a data engineer on Facebook’s Civic Integrity team. She has uncovered disturbing trends in the platform’s algorithm and how quickly it has radicalized many of its users. What unfolds is how one story feeds into the other. Both culminate in a dark day in American history and the potential for a triumphant moment in the Sorkin vein.
This particular Reckoning speaks to (and now we come to the meat of the matter) Sorkin’s aforementioned limitations. He has never displayed more than lackluster chops, and here he’s fully out of control of how the story is told. Much has been made of Strong’s method approach and the backlash that follows such self-seriousness about the craft. Pair that with a director who has no idea how to coax out honed performances, and you get a combustible situation that tips toward parody. It’s difficult to find the line between what Strong does here and a Saturday Night Live version of the same keyed-up take on one of the world’s wealthiest men. Sadly, only a couple of seasons removed from her Best Actress win for Anora, Madison doesn’t fare much better. She takes the archetypal Sorkin role of the “pretty, quirky woman trying to bust her way through the system” and delivers plasticine line readings that leave you wondering whether Sean Baker is a greater illusionist than anyone assumed. White comes closest to producing a character with real flesh on his bones. Again, the hardworking, gritty journalist in a rapidly dying industry feels like another favorite from the usual Sorkin Crayola box. Still, the cringe factor drops significantly whenever Horwitz takes center stage.
That said, he and the rest of the cast are severely wounded by their director’s inability to self-edit. When Sorkin worked with Fincher or Danny Boyle, it’s easy to sense where those far more capable storytellers curtailed the chattiness and digressions and drilled down to the core of his screenplays. Those movies work because of that combined effort. Not so here, where the warts-and-all approach leads to digressions that strike a strange, sour note in far too many scenes. Discussions of Frank Capra, and of whether “spatula” is a Hebrew word, abound. No single one is a mortal wound, but we’re in death-by-a-thousand-cuts territory. By the time the merciful end credits arrive, we’re dying soldiers dragging our bloodied bodies across no man’s land.
The Social Reckoning‘s technical flaws are plentiful, certainly, but we must return to the core question: why does this movie exist? Money, sure, but we know it isn’t going to make much. So what is its thematic purpose? On screen, it’s clear that Sorkin’s institutionalism continues to override all else. In his worldview, a brave young woman testifying before the U.S. Senate becomes, with swelling orchestration, a moment of unabashed triumph. But we all know the truth: she was testifying before a bunch of septuagenarians who barely know what a computer is. In his worldview, all that was needed on January 6th was for Zuckerberg to make the fateful decision to pull the plug on Donald Trump’s Facebook account. The truth there is murkier, too. In 2021, how powerful was Facebook, really?
Those of us whose memories reach back more than a couple of years (a rarer thing nowadays, I realize) recall that Twitter was the real fulcrum of the then- and now-again President’s communications. The organizing behind January 6th was also spread across Twitter and less savory corners of social media, not just Facebook. But none of that fits the basic story Sorkin needed to tell in order to write and market a sequel no one asked for. And apparently no one ever told him the unwritten rule of social media: a platform stops being cool once your parents are on it. Facebook was already there by the mid-2010s. Remarkably, the one angle that could have been explored, and is teased only briefly, is Instagram’s role in bullying in schools. I was convinced we were headed into that territory instead, toward the hearing where Zuckerberg embarrassed himself in front of senators and an audience of grieving parents with the most robotic apology I’ve ever seen. But ’twas not to be.
There’s a better movie here, one that drops the Zuckerberg thread entirely and instead tackles social media’s broader reach over the last decade. Most notably, it would cover how social media has led to a rash of teen suicides and turned many Americans into bizarro versions of themselves, casting aside science and common sense in one go. Facebook itself would, and should, be only a fraction of that story.
But that wouldn’t be a sequel to The Social Network. Then again, it turns out there’s no real value in that either.