The Social Reckoning is Facebook without style

We’re in the thick of summer movie season, but it’s never too soon to start looking at the fall film-to-Oscar pipeline. One film that is sure to get a head start is The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network. Where that film traces Facebook’s origins, The Social Reckoning focuses on the 2021 Facebook leak and subsequent congressional hearings and investigations.

Aaron Sorkin won an Oscar for scripting The Social Network, but that film was directed by David Fincher, and the combination of Sorkin and Fincher turned that film into a bleak warning about the oligarchy to come. Fincher declined to come back for the sequel(ish), as did Network star Jesse Eisenberg. Sorkin is now taking over directorial duties, and Mark Zuckerberg, no longer a college kid, is now played by Jeremy Strong doing a pretty damn good Zuck-voice in the trailer.

Jesse Eisenberg declined to return to play Zuck, so I have zero qualms about Jeremy Strong taking over. It really does sound like he just wasn’t interested in revisiting the character. But I also think the advantage of recasting the central role of the project underscores more effectively that we are dealing with two different eras of Facebook, and how much changed in like, barely 15 years. The recasting is so effective it’s actually redundant when Strong-as-Zuck announces, “I’m not two years out of a dorm room anymore.” Sorkin can be a great writer, but he can also land some real clunkers.

The film also stars Mikey Madison, in her first role since Anora—displaying a level of patience and taste that I hope is rewarded richly—as whistleblower Frances Haugen, and Jeremy Allen White as journalist Jeff Horwitz. Wunmi Mosaku, Bill Burr, Billy Magnussen, and Betty Gilpin also star. OF COURSE Billy Magnussen is playing a tech bro jagoff. He is a good actor, with a wider range than he often gets to display, but that is only because Billy Magnussen is MADE to play jagoffs. That guy smirks on screen and I automatically start doing jerk-off motions about whatever his character is saying.

So, the cast is good, the subject is rich, we know Sorkin can write a script, but his direction is…not David Fincher. Sorkin is good at confrontational courtroom style scenes, which he has a long history of writing, but I don’t think he has thematic flair like a director such as David Fincher. All of Sorkin’s style is dictated by his writing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but a huge reason The Social Network holds up is because of Fincher’s particular vision.

The Social Network is a techno-fascist nightmare dressed up as a college coming-of-age, but Fincher always hints at the villainous roots of the story through visual cues, particularly the sickly green color grading—which becomes more prominent the further removed from healthy human interaction Zuckerberg becomes—and the Trent Reznor-Atticus Ross score, which buzzes with tension and lends the film an eerie emotional landscape. The score is a musical expression of “on tenterhooks”, just waiting for the moment when it all goes wrong.

I just don’t really trust Sorkin to deliver on that level of cinematic contextualization. None of his previous work suggests that is the way he directs. I expect the dialogue to crackle and the interrogation scenes, from boardrooms to congress, to be sharp and explosive. I just don’t expect a lot of style. If you want to see this in action, just go back and look at the trailer for The Social Network. The difference between Network and Reckoning isn’t casting or the passage of time. It’s style.