Quest-en-Scène: The Social Reckoning Is Not Reckoning With Anything

I have a deep history with The Social Network. I watched it for the first time when I was 15 and was immediately obsessed. In the years since then, it has become one of my favorite movies and by far my most rewatched movie of all time. I am known amongst my friends for my Social Network obsession (I will never stop suggesting it for movie night!) and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have been my top artists on Spotify for many years due to the frankly concerning number of hours I have spent listening to the film score. All that being said, when The Social Reckoning was announced, I was immediately apprehensive. The legacy sequel has grown more common as Hollywood gets increasingly creatively bankrupt, but this seemed like an especially odd choice. The Devil Wears Prada? Sure. Practical Magic? Why not? The Social Network? Huh? I was not excited in the least and I actively felt dread wash over me whenever I thought about the film, but my morbid curiosity got the best of me. I went into this film with the lowest expectations possible, but somehow it was worse than I could have ever imagined. 

The Social Reckoning is a dramatization of the 2021 Facebook leak, in which whistleblower Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison) leaked internal Facebook documents alongside journalist Jeff Horowitz (played by Jeremy Allen White). These documents revealed the company’s awareness of, and purposeful lack of response to, their algorithms pushing false information and harmful, radicalizing content to users. On the surface, this is an interesting idea. However, the film’s messaging and how it chooses to portray these events already feel outdated, despite the story only taking place five years ago. 

What makes The Social Network successful is how astute its criticisms of the culture surrounding Facebook were at the time of its release. In the early 2010s, the dangers of social media weren’t widely discussed the way they are now and there was a naive optimism surrounding the tech industry that is unthinkable in our current year. The film’s criticism of these topics and Mark Zuckerberg himself at a time when he was still extremely powerful and relevant, felt bold and interesting. Despite being set nearly 15 years later, The Social Reckoning does little to advance The Social Network’s messaging or update it to the modern day. All the film has to say is that “social media can be harmful,” and “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook at large don’t care about the well-being of their users.” Okay, and? The film is superficially committed to accurately reflecting this time period, through its unrealistically self aware dialogue about the COVID-19 pandemic (Frances is somehow able to sense how severe the pandemic will be months before lockdown and has several pithy remarks about this) and tonally bizarre intercuts of footage from the January 6 riot while dramatic classical music plays. Despite this, the film has absolutely nothing of value to say about this time period, its messaging feeling dated and irrelevant even for 2021. The culture has moved on.

An additional thing to understand about The Social Network is how its acting and stylistic elements were able to significantly elevate a premise that was not immediately appealing. The combination of Aaron Sorkin’s sarcastic, indulgently clever writing with David Fincher’s cold and exacting directorial style creates a really unique contrast that perfectly matched the way the film characterized Mark Zuckerberg. Combine this with incredible acting from some of the best actors of the 2010s—especially the two leads, Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield—and a super cool techno score, and you have an incredible movie on your hands. The Social Reckoning has none of this. 

The only member of the original cast and crew to return for The Social Reckoning is screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who also directed the film. Sorkin has a notorious reputation for being a good screenwriter who is absolutely unable to direct his own material, and this continues to be true. The script, while already fairly weak and uninspired, is portrayed in the most unimaginative and lazy way possible, employing numerous choices that convince me that Sorkin believes his audience is stupid. The film is arbitrarily split up into stupid chapter titles (I knew the film would be bad when it opened with the text “Prologue: White Girl Wasted”), and every time the film nonlinearly switched between events it feels the need to overlay the scene with what year it is, even if the previous scene in that time period had just happened 10 minutes ago. The lack of trust in the audience’s intelligence was infuriating, and made the film feel painful to watch. Combine this with boring cinematography and an unmemorable score, all of the most distinctive elements of The Social Reckoning’s predecessor are completely absent.

Perhaps the only positive thing I can say about the film is that I liked Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg. He takes a different approach than Eisenberg, leaning more into mimicking the real life man’s mannerisms and speech patterns in a way that felt uncanny and at times very disturbing. He’s in the movie for significantly less time than the trailers and marketing suggest, but he is by far its most memorable element. Madison and White do their best, but they are ultimately stymied by the film’s poor writing and both give dull and lifeless performances. All of their lines are delivered as if they are being held at gunpoint, and unlike Fincher’s controlling and tyrannical directorial methods, it did not yield good results.

Overall, The Social Reckoning was a horrible film and a waste of my time. The thing that confounds me most about this film is simple: Why? Why spend millions of dollars and risk tarnishing the legacy of one of the best films of the 21st century for a vapid and dull film about absolutely nothing? If one thing’s for certain, Eisenberg got the last laugh. He turned down being in this film and instead wrote and directed The Debut, a film that has gained significant acclaim and Oscar buzz throughout its festival run. Good on you, Jesse, you dodged a bullet.