The Social Reckoning review – Aaron Sorkin’s jittery sequel with all-new evil puppet Zuckerberg

Here is a film for all those people who solemnly deplore social media in conversation but haven’t quite got round to deleting their accounts. Sixteen years have gone by since The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher; this was the addictive, obsessive-compulsive movie about the birth of Facebook in Harvard’s macho-competitive cauldron of student sexism and nerdy self-pity, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the fast-talking, arrogant, not-necessarily-evil genius Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sorkin is back with a sequel of sorts, directing his own script – and now Zuckerberg is basically evil, but also weirdly slow talking, as if all the zinging, smart-alecky Sorkinesque dialogue energy of the first film has been siphoned away in early middle age and dispersed among the insurgents in the new cast.

Sorkin’s jittery, funny, syncopated style is unmistakable, as distinctive in its way as David Mamet, although he has one joke about “spatula” being a Yiddish word that he has borrowed from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It is the story of how in 2021, Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire was challenged by courageous whistleblower-employee Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, who were on a mission to tell the world how Zuckerberg, scared by falling revenue, changed the algorithm so that engagement was supercharged by rage bait and hate speech, malice and envy. Facebook, moreover, didn’t factcheck political ads, thus driving a huge, nationwide surge in extremist groups and teen bullying and becoming a major player in the Capitol riots. (Having said that, this film does not say aloud the word “Trump” and rather cravenly declines to specify Maga activity.)

Mikey Madison sympathetically plays the unhappy, principled, supersmart Haugen, who is dismissed as a “disrupter” – and Sorkin leaves it to us to notice that this in other circumstances is what oligarchs smugly call themselves. Jeremy Allen White does a capable, unflashy, unrisky job as Horwitz, a stolid performance that perhaps, in sync with the film, tells us about the diligent professionalism of old-school print journalism. And Zuckerberg? Well, we were all hoping and expecting it would be Jesse Eisenberg again. (You’ve heard of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood; this would be Aaron Sorkin’s Techbrohood.) But no: it is Jeremy Strong, who does a very interesting Zuckerberg impersonation, standing and sitting like a Thunderbird puppet, modifying the torpid sadness of his Kendall Roy in TV’s Succession, making this the unhurried contempt of someone simultaneously burdened and energised by knowing he’s richer and therefore smarter than everyone else. (A famous line in The Social Network was “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” This film starts by telling us that Facebook is worth a trillion dollars.)

Zuckerberg, though, is almost a cameo, with no equals with whom he can exchange dialogue, only employees – although the film imagines one former investor-turned-critic called Charlie (Bill Burr) who heckles Zuckerberg’s practice performance before a confessional hearing, with Zuckerberg amusingly having to be told how to smile. Charlie is the angry, unheeded voice of conscience.

Rattles along at an entertaining clip … L to r, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz and Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen in The Social Reckoning.

The resulting drama rattles along at an entertaining clip, although there are false notes. When Frances has secret meetings with Horwitz in a hotel, the film has her wearing a slinky evening dress, supposedly as a kind of disguise, so that if recognised it would seem like she was out on a date. Hmm, really? Or is it so that the movie’s female lead has scenes where she looks glamorous? Later, Horwitz affectionately tells her to be less “mean”. But she is not “mean”. She just speaks Sorkinspeak. So does Horwitz. The ubiquity of Sorkinspeak effaces the difference between all the characters.

The most disturbing scene comes at the very beginning, showing a drunk woman livestreaming her racist abuse of traffic cops; this is the woman whom Haugen recognises as an acquaintance of hers, radicalised by Facebook. Towards the end we glimpse her again, looking ambiguously appalled by what she has become. But would she be appalled in reality? Or is this just the film-makers’ wish fulfilment? The closing-credit titles – usually the platform for a film to promote and summarise its heroes’ achievements – concedes that Facebook still isn’t checking political ads. Plus, of course, the film is set at the start of the Trump interregnum of 2020-24, when it seemed as if the Capitol riots were the ultimate wake-up call and moderation had returned. Nowadays Trump and his tech bro courtiers are more vainglorious than ever, and the values of investigative journalism have been thrown out at the Washington Post by its owner Jeff Bezos. This is a film which doesn’t reckon with the future we’re living in.