The Social Network is one of the great films of the 2010s. Written by esteemed playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, directed by auteur David Fincher and featuring an instantly iconic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the movie depicts the dawn of a new hyper-digital era. Years later, it maintains an eerie prescience.
Given all that, it’s not entirely fair to compare The Social Network to its new sequel, The Social Reckoning,which hits theaters Friday. But the movie’s complete lack of visual style and embarrassingly generic score are, unfortunately, constant reminders that David Fincher and the Nine Inch Nails boys are nowhere to be found this time. Instead, the new movie is written anddirected by Aaron Sorkin — and is a case study in the impact a talented director has on a film, even when the writer brings a lot to the table. (Oddly enough, Fincher was busy making a sequel to another beloved movie, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, despite having no involvement with the original.)
The Social Reckoningfollows Frances Haugen, a young Facebook engineer played by 2025 Best Actress Oscar winner Mikey Madison, who crosses paths with Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter played by The Bearheartthrob Jeremy Allen White, and winds up blowing the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets. Essentially, it’s a journalism movie about the Facebook Files, a series of investigative reports from the Journal that revealed internal findings about the company’s platforms, including indictations that Instagram had negative effects on teen mental health and how its algorithm exposed users to misinformation and extremist content.
There has been ample material to work with in the years since we last checked in with Mark Zuckerberg, who is now played by notoriously intense method actor Jeremy Strong, in an impressively strange performance that makes Zuck out to be more space alien than human and someone who prizes profits and growth over everything. The Facebook Files revelations made The Social Networkan even more important movie in retrospect, and you can feel Reckoningstraining for the same status. The problem is, you can’t set out to write an Important Movie, and Sorkin doesn’t seem willing to leave that judgment to the masses.
There’s a ham-fisted quality to the way Sorkin connects characters in his movie to actual events — I didn’t expect the movie to heavily involve Jan. 6, though I can see why it does — and despite its earnestness, there were chuckles at my screening when a minor character introduced early in the film reappeared to drive home a key message. Though I appreciate a movie tackling important issues like what Facebook has historically gotten away with, the treatment here is simply too pat and on-the-nose.
The biggest problem with The Social Reckoninglies outside the film: Our current reality undercuts the entire notion that there was any sort of “reckoning” for Facebook or Zuckerberg. Sure, people found out about their misdeeds, but it only had a minimal effect on Meta’s bottom line, and the company is still thriving today.
The movie desperately wants a happy ending, one in which you can imagine a character punching the air in a cinematic moment of victory, a gesture that rings hollow if you are alive in the world today. The Social Reckoninglooks and feels more like a cheap knockoff TV movie follow-up to The Social Network than a real, expensive movie made by the same studio that produced the original. It tells an important story, but without any of the verve that made Fincher’s film stand the test of time.
