“Hamlet Returns.” “Gatsby II: Callaway’s Revenge.” “Casablanca: The Vichy Era”.
It’s fun to think about sequels to classics, partly because the Furious series made the convention of sequel titles meme-able, but also because touching perfection is inherently ridiculous.
In a just world, Social Reckoning would be among those titles. Unfortunately, in this world, it’s a true sequel to Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s 2010 masterpiece The Social Network. The film is a fascinating meditation on the nature of our humanity. Its successor is a two-hour Slate podcast drama.
“Social Reckoning” picks up ten years after “The Social Network” went off the air. Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) now runs a tech empire and is preparing to testify before Congress, surrounded by advisers trying to make him look human. But scenes with Zuckerberg are sparse, and the film focuses primarily on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mike Madison) and her efforts to expose the company’s secrets with the help of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White).
We don’t need to get hung up on the plot; the film is mostly a blow-by-blow presentation of Horwitz’s 2021 story, though it adds Zuckerberg’s testimony about what happened months earlier in real life. This actual news cycle has been dominating the headlines lately enough for everyone to remember the details. Under Zuckerberg’s direction, Facebook’s algorithm began to prioritize retweets and emoji reactions over likes. This incentivizes people to post inflammatory content and causes it to spread widely, in what Haugen and others say is a vicious cycle that poses a threat to American democracy.
One of the more shocking parts of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook filing involves how the company deliberately ignored Instagram’s harmful effects on children, especially young girls, who joined the platform for friendship but instead discovered bullying, unwanted sexual advances and, in some cases, human trafficking. But this is more or less glossed over in the film, condensed into essentials to make room for a montage of the January 6 riots.
It’s no surprise that Aaron Sorkin, the high priest of American liberalism, has made a film criticizing social media polarization and January 6th. After all, that’s Sorkin’s trademark. But “Social Reckoning” doesn’t come across as didactic in the way Sorkin is accustomed to. There are no grand ideas or overarching monologues about human greatness. The banter-filled walk-and-talk style that defined “The West Wing” was replaced by technocratic chatter. The point is not to make a point, but to communicate a lot of information in a way that the audience will all come to the same conclusion. The whole thing feels small.
That’s the problem. Sorkin is at his best when he’s making big attacks and driving for the fences. A majestic speech, a wonderful debate, and a perfect shot. The man understands drama and the importance of seriousness, a topic on which his characters often opine. But for some reason, “Social Reckoning” shows no real traces of Sorkin.
This is somewhat an example of Sorkin’s Achilles’ heel: the more he tries to capture reality, the more likely he is to fail. “The West Wing” succeeds in large part because it is a drama. Realistic, yes, and accurate at times, but still a drama with fictional countries and characters driving the plot.
By contrast, “The Newsroom” is a flawed HBO series in which Sorkin created a fictional cable show set in the real world of early 2010s America. Even Sorkin admits that his reliance on real events was “like a pebble in my shoe,” preventing him from ever “putting his[ting] A good episode of the show. “
Likewise, The Social Network is unabashedly cinematic. What on paper was a story about two civil lawsuits became, in Sorkin’s hands, a timeless tale of class and ambition. Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg, a struggling outsider who is so eager to join the upper echelons of society that after being repeatedly denied access to this higher class, he creates an entirely new upper class and quickly reaches the top. Even that doesn’t satisfy him—the film famously ends with a shot of Zuckerberg alone, refreshing a pending friend request from his ex-girlfriend, whose rejection prompted him to launch Facebook in the first place—which shows that Mark is human too, all too human.
In “Social Reckoning,” Jeremy Strong gives us a familiar caricature of Zuckerberg, a heartless robot with no interest in others and focused solely on success. One of the reasons “The Social Network” is so profound is that it breaks Zuckerberg’s image. But Mark Zuckerberg is not deep enough for a “social reckoning” to work. He must be a cold giant willing to sacrifice children and democracy and everything in between rather than lose even one Facebook user. So Sorkin completely repudiates his first film, abandoning one of the great characters of 21st century cinema in favor of a cheap political prop.
The problem isn’t that Sorkin isn’t giving Zuckerberg a fair shake, it’s that this doesn’t make for a good movie. In “Social Reckoning,” the motivations of both heroes and villains are clear: Zuckerberg is wrong because he only cares about money; Zuckerberg is wrong because he only cares about money; Haugen and Horwitz are good because they care about the truth.
In Social Network, the heroes and villains are equally clear, but their motivations and personalities are extremely vague. Mark is both compassionate and pathetic, a man wreaking havoc and a boy begging for attention. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) are clearly wronged by Mark, but are so arrogant that it seems like they’ve earned it.
Then there’s Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, played to perfection by Andrew Garfield. In the film’s best scene, Eduardo questions Mark’s dilution of his shares and drives him out of the company.
“You framed me,” Eduardo said, clearly hurt by his best friend’s betrayal.
“You’re going to blame me because you’re the head of business and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Mark retorted with a condescending manner that was both mean and borrowed, as if he were trying on his father’s Hermès tie.
It’s an incredible moment, not just for the drama—the betrayal, the reveal, the stakes—but because, for a brief moment, you can see it on Eduardo’s face as he realizes that Mark is right about something. We, the audience, realize this too. It breaks our hearts even more: friendship turns into business, trust gives way to transaction, and the company succeeds while everyone gets hurt.
There isn’t a single moment in The Social Reckoning’s two-hour runtime that comes close to this scene, nor is there a single similarly great scene that makes up The Social Network, one of the most beautifully written, shot, and scored films ever made. It’s a shame, too, because Madison and White are two of our best actors. It would be fun to see them dig into a proper Sorkin script instead of this blood-curdling NPR fan fiction.
“Social Reckoning” has been called a “stand-alone sequel” to “Social Network Wars”. It’s a ridiculous, contradictory phrase – but once you’ve seen the movie, you’ll understand why. If I were Sorkin, I wouldn’t want anyone comparing this run-of-the-mill historical drama to my masterpiece. That’s fair enough. But you don’t have to have seen “The Social Network” to know that “Social Reckoning” is a terrible movie. This is self-evident; such comparisons only add insult to injury.
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