Jeremy Strong Is An Uncanny Zuckerberg In The Social Reckoning
Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network sequel unveils its first trailer.
Nobody jumped when writer-director Aaron Sorkin announced his intentions to actually make a sequel to The Social Network. The 2010 film, penned by Sorkin and directed with icy skill by David Fincher, would have been equally unnecessary in anyone else’s hands. That it premiered in the year it did — timely enough to sum up the past 10 years of the social media boom, and prescient enough to forecast Zuckerberg’s fall from grace — was something of a miracle. But a sequel has always felt gratuitous because... well, aren’t we already living in it?
We’ve had a front-row seat to the inflation of Zuckerberg’s ego; many of us read the exposé, published by the Wall Street Journal, that confirmed the worst about his empire. The rest of us experienced the mind-numbing toxicity and misinformation running rampant on Facebook firsthand. Journalist Jeff Horwitz was one of the first to wrangle that fuzzy data into allegations that could be quantified, and later used to indict Zuckerberg for a kind of social media malpractice. In a just world (read: a world not implicitly obsessed with IP), the “Facebook Files” would be the final word on the platform for at least a few decades. But Sorkin genuinely believes that “it’s time to say more” — fortunately, he’s tapped Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his new spokesman.
In the first trailer for The Social Reckoning, Strong’s Zuckerberg is preparing to defend his company from the accusations levied against it in the “Facebook Files.” The other half of the film will be set further in the past, following Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) as he works with whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) to uncover Facebook’s most guarded secrets. There’s a little less of the deposition drama that its predecessor used as its frame story, and more of an investigation that takes a page from All the President’s Men. Admittedly, its added intensity does make it all the more intriguing. Sorkin can’t quite capture the uneasy vibes that have become trademark Fincher, but he makes a good choice focusing on what his own strong suits: courtroom intrigue and eloquent rants.
It is, again, a little annoying that a “companion piece” to The Social Network has to exist, but Sorkin was smart to tap such a transformative actor as the original film’s central villain. Strong actually feels like a natural enough progression from Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg: it’s easy to imagine how the former grew into the even bigger narcissist we meet in The Social Reckoning. Strong is always in great form, and his performance here doesn’t look like it’ll disappoint. If nothing else, it might be justification enough for the price of admission.
