Hating a movie can be just as productive, and potentially more entertaining, than loving it.
A film that’s egregiously stupid, poorly thought-out or just plain evil can provide just as much fodder for thought and discussion as one that’s genuinely moving. In both cases, there’s at least something to care about.
Which is what makes it so disappointing to encounter something like The Social Reckoning. Because the Aaron Sorkin written-and-directed sequel to The Social Network — 2010’s incredible Facebook origin story written by Sorkin and directed by David Fincher — is one of those rare, deplorable anti-art creations.
One of those movies that’s so vapid and unoriginal it resists serious hatred, even while trying to position itself as endlessly relevant. In general, it’s such an insulting bore that it lacks enough insight or opinion to even disagree with, let alone productively hate.
Which, being about the scourge of social media and corporate controlled groupthink, could make it an example of the problem Sorkin attempts to expose: there’s no shortage of low-quality, uninteresting “content” clogging our feeds and For You pages.
But this fumbling of fertile source material comes courtesy of a cast and crew that features some of the more interesting creatives currently working.
The Social Reckoning charts Facebook’s period of endless growth and promises to be a take-down of one of the three tech oligarchs of the apocalypse. (The other two being depicted in Alex Gibney’s documentary Musk, slated for an Oct. 16 release in Canada, and Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman/OpenAI critique Artificial that just premiered to rave reviews at the New York Film Festival.)
WATCH | The Social Reckoning trailer:
The implicit sales pitch here is that this is an incisive and timely piece that will open eyes and turn the world on its head. But instead of Spotlight, here’s what we get: The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White plays Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, a reporter at a struggling (what’s new?) outlet trying to retain readers flocking to social media. And Anora‘s Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, a disillusioned product manager working for Facebook’s civic misinformation team.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, they quickly find one another and begin to unravel and expose a secretive pattern of malpractice going by the name of MSI (Meaningful Social Interactions) that has come to destabilize governments, rot brains and destroy the very nature of truth. Again, what else is new?
Meanwhile, Succession’s Jeremy Strong plays big-bad Mark Zuckerberg on a precipitous fall from grace, both in terms of the character’s in-universe PR and in terms of how he’s been portrayed on film.
Here, Zuckerberg is staring down studio lights, prepping for a hearing on his company’s contribution to the destruction of liberal democracy and the mental health of children around the globe.
Compared to Jesse Eisenberg’s layered, barbed and infinitely fascinating interpretation, which earned him his first and only acting Oscar nomination, this Zuckerberg comes off as more uninspired and poorly thought out than the Metaverse he created.
If it weren’t for the carnival-esque way Strong brings out the infamously alien characteristics of a man once forced to publicly claim he was not actually a lizard, he’d be almost entirely incidental to the plot.
Mikey Madison, left, and Jeremy Allen White star in The Social Reckoning. (Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures/The Associated Press)
Outside the terrifyingly controlled mannerisms of a socially awkward praying mantis — and a haircut somewhere between Fargo‘s Ole Munch and Starburst’s Berries and Cream man — this Zuckerberg stays firmly in the background.
Zuckerberg’s motivations drove the singular and direct original, making it a compelling psychoanalytical character study. This time, we get almost nothing narratively from the man who instead peers oddly from corners and mostly unimportant side scenes, unsettling you with the occasional reminder that he exists, before once again proving that, in the grand scheme of things, he doesn’t actually have much influence over how any of this plays out.
That is, so far as this mundane, unilaterally boring and unimaginably cliché narrative is concerned.
Sorkin’s Zuckerberg operates like a cheap marketing gimmick, set dressing to trick audiences into watching the exasperated but enamoured reporter Horwitz guide the headstrong, heart-of-gold Haugen into battle with the all-powerful man behind the curtain. Like an amateur screenwriter’s version of The Client, but with more computers.
This is not entirely Strong’s fault. From his endlessly pathetic and committed turn as Kendall Roy, to his scene-stealing performance as Trump’s fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, we know that if there was any narrative meat on the bones to chew here, he undoubtedly would have found it.
Instead, the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of Sorkin. For those who already can’t stand the West Wing and Moneyball writer’s racing, stylized dialogue and stilted circumstances, this will perhaps come as no surprise. But even for those who love the heightened reality schtick of the Sorkinverse, The Social Reckoning is nothing but a disappointment.
Here, all we get is a hamfisted and saccharine story that somehow both exploits and glosses over its topical and prescient issues. A meandering, self-indulgent collage of journalism tropes that leads to White and Madison directly referencing other, better journalism movies in their on-screen dialogue.
And it all culminates in an ending so incredibly, unbelievably trite it almost makes you think Sorkin was actively trying to send up the sentimental text-on-screen ending of Stand By Me.
But the worst thing about The Social Reckoning is not any of this. It’s everything between these failings. It is the almost total and absolute lack of risk, specificity or intent. It is the fact that the movie’s entire runtime seems to operate as an excuse to take up time. It’s the fact that Sorkin — an Academy and Emmy-award winning writer — has crafted something so completely neutered that it barely merits hatred.
This is bad for comparative purposes: While The Social Network used the founding of Facebook as a scaffold to investigate its creator’s psyche, Reckoning uses it as set dressing to illustrate a Wikipedia entry that isn’t even particularly accurate.
But beyond comparisons to its predecessor, Reckoning is also disappointing because it lacks anything to dislike. It is disappointing for its general greyness and its cowardice. And that, more than anything else, is the worst thing a piece of art can be.
