Waiting for “The Social Reckoning” that is never coming

2010’s “The Social Network” is one of the greatest movies of the last 20 years. It chronicles the birth of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin wrote it, and David Fincher directed it- an incredible writer-director pairing. Sorkin’s crisp, beautiful writing, combined with Fincher’s obsessive attention to detail, gave cinema an incredible gift. Here we are, 16 years later, and a lot has changed. The platform once known for sharing pictures of your kids has become one of the internet's leading sources of misinformation. “The Social Reckoning” attempts to tell that story.

Set in 2019 and 2021, “The Social Reckoning” follows Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) as he uses information from Facebook engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) to write a story about Facebook favoring engagement over public safety in The Facebook Files. In 2021, Mark Zukerburg (Jeremy Strong) preps for his appearance before Congress as Horwitz prepares to publish a series of stories that could damage the company.

The performances here are good, but not great. Madison is the stronger of the two leads. She brings a much different energy than her Oscar-winning role in “Anora.” Frances loves her job and believes in Facebook's mission, but she doesn’t like that it seems to be radicalizing people. She goes to Horwitz because she wants to make Facebook better. When she sees things getting worse, she fully commits to being his source inside the company. She reminds us what Facebook could be: a place to connect with other people. It is a naive notion, especially in 2019, when Facebook was already on the path it's on now. Much of her dialogue, in particular, felt like it came straight out of writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” which leaned heavily toward an idealistic view of things even in the worst of times. I like this style sometimes, but not when it comes to the existential dread of tech companies doing whatever they want to keep power and money in their hands.

You could take Zukerburg completely out of this movie, and it would have zero effect on the plot. We know that he is a pod person pretending to be human and only cares about his bottom line. We don’t need a scene where he doesn't immediately shut down the current president on January 6th, when he was posting encouragement to the rioters. None of this is new information that sheds any light on who Mark Zukerburg is. He should have been a presence in the movie, not actually in it. It would have made more sense, and felt more foreboding, not to see the company’s founder and just have him be this shroud hanging over everything Haugen and Horwitz are doing.

Here is the thing about this movie: I am not sure what the point of it is. It’s not like the company has faced any real consequences for what The Facebook Files revealed. The movie wants you to feel like what Horwitz and Haugen are doing matters at all, and that the series of articles The Wall Street Journal published did anything. Meta, Facebook's parent company, has made no policy changes to address any of the findings. Instead of improving fact-checking, they got rid of it altogether. The movie ends with Haugen’s congressional testimony, which should be the big moment, but then it undercuts it with on-screen text outlining everything that hasn’t changed.

There are flashes of a great movie here, but they are few and far between. The truth is that none of the events in this movie mattered. It was a huge letdown, and the more I think about it, the more disappointing it is. It skates by on strong writing and solid performances from Madison and White. I have heard that Sorkin wants to write a third Facebook movie, but I don’t see the point. There is nothing more compelling or interesting to say about Facebook. They'll keep doing whatever they want and face zero consequences.

7/10

Rated R for language

1h 52m