The Social Reckoning Doesn’t Reckon With Much Of Anything

There was a time when everything Aaron Sorkin’s pen touched turned to gold. There were few who rivaled the writer behind The West Wing and A Few Good Men in the gift of the gab, and even fewer who could make the walk-and-talk seem so electric. And of course, there’s The Social Network, a pitch-perfect screenplay that’s arguably Sorkin’s magnum opus, lent depth and allure by David Fincher’s meticulous direction.

But somewhere in the past decade or so, Sorkin’s works started to lose their shine. Perhaps it was when he returned to TV with the self-satisfied series The Newsroom, a monologue-driven show about how Aaron Sorkin would report news the right way, two years after said news took place. Or perhaps it was when Sorkin stepped behind the camera to start directing his own films, and proved to be a perfectly okay director. Whatever the case, Sorkin’s newest film, The Social Reckoning, falls under both those umbrellas: a dramatization of the events leading up to the publication of The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 Facebook Files that feels neither novel nor all-that-interestingly directed. But The Social Reckoning wouldn’t feel so middling if it wasn’t a clear follow-up to — and drastic downgrade from — the masterpiece that was The Social Network.

The Social Reckoning begins in 2019, when Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) happens upon a video that her one-time progressive friend posted on a right-wing group. In it, she’s drunkenly complaining about being targeted by minority cops, claiming it’s because she’s a white woman in America. It’s a portrait of a person off the deep end, and it disturbs Frances enough that she starts digging into Facebook’s own systems to discover how this happened. What she finds disturbs her even further: multiple red flags that Facebook’s own algorithm had actively radicalized a large portion of its user base. When her concerns fall on deaf ears at her workplace, she turns to the Wall Street Journal’s new tech reporter, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), hoping that he’ll help expose what’s happening before it’s too late. But Frances’ reluctance to leak the most damning documents to Jeff, and Jeff’s own ignorance about the minutiae of the tech he’s reporting on, leads to the delay of the exposés publication until 2021…right on the eve of the January 6th riots.

The idea for The Social Reckoning had been percolating in Sorkin’s mind since 2019, with the writer drumming up support for a sequel to The Social Network, with original star Jesse Eisenberg and Fincher back in the director’s chair, for the next few years. It wasn’t until 2025, after Sorkin announced he had begun work on a script tied to the January 6th Capitol attack, that the prospect of this movie became real. And by that time, both Eisenberg and Fincher had bowed out of the project, and Sorkin was forging ahead on his own, ultimately casting Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg.

I give all this background because you can tell that The Social Reckoning is built on the concept of a great idea for a movie, rather than an actual great idea. In other words, it’s the classic cart before the horse. The WSJ’s Facebook Files were staggering when they came out, but not all that revelatory; instead, they just confirmed compounding feelings about extremism and radicalization that had taken root during Trump’s first term. And The Social Reckoning doubles down on this feeling, except with Sorkin’s trademark centrism turned up. The characters dance around naming the “sitting President,” and bandy about buzzwords like “radicalized” and “Qanon” without actually addressing the rot at the center of this cultural shift. It’s a movie built backwards from its hook.

Even then, once we arrive at the January 6th riots, it feels like a climax in isolation from its central narrative. Sorkin attempts to foreshadow this explosive consequence of Facebook’s “profit at all costs” actions by loosely interweaving sequences in which Zuckerberg prepares for a testimony before Congress, but the film’s sudden structural change-up (complete with a visual timeline that toggles back and forth between 2019 and 2021) feels labored. By the time the January 6th riots play out onscreen, it feels like they’re there to artificially inject some suspense into the proceedings.

Oddly, it’s in these brief scenes — especially the verbal spars between Strong’s Zuckerberg and Bill Burr’s Charlie Garritty (a fictional amalgamation of various real-life people) — that The Social Reckoning feels like it comes somewhat close to the perfection that was The Social Network. Strong plays Zuckerberg like a cross between a Bond villain and a robot trying to be human; a smart choice considering the reputation the real Zuckerberg has developed, but one that The Social Reckoning doesn’t feel capable of exploring further. But the movie finally starts to feel like it moves beyond the “vague approximation of a Sorkin movie” vibes (which it inhabits for most of its runtime) when Burr’s Charlie pushes Zuckerberg enough that the cracks in his robotic armor start to show, and we see glimpses of the angry, emotional human being underneath.

It’s not that the scenes of Frances and Jeff building their case against Facebook are a slog, but they feel painfully pedestrian, as if The Social Reckoning is going through the motions of an All the President’s Men or Spotlight-type film. Madison and White are perfectly fine, though their more shaggy performance styles seem ill-suited to Sorkin’s lightning-fast dialogue. It doesn’t help that they’re thinly sketched out at best, and representative of some of Sorkin’s most tired archetypes at worst (Madison’s Frances, with her penchant for legwarmers and her neurotic personality in the body of a beautiful woman, feels like the most egregious example of this). Most of the supporting characters in WSJ’s newsroom are there to deliver typical Sorkin-isms — one bit in which a character points out that the tagline for Facebook’s Civic Integrity team misuses the word “conscious” drags on for an agonizingly long time — though Betty Gilpin provides a breath of fresh air as Jeff’s hard-nosed editor.

At the end of the day, it’s uncertain who The Social Reckoning is made for, except for maybe Sorkin himself. It may be competently made, but in comparison to what it follows, competence inevitably adds up to disappointment.

The Social Reckoning opens in theaters October 9.