Still no ‘Reckoning’
Aaron Sorkin revisits the once-quaint landscape of Facebook.
the Social REckOning
Director: Aaron Sorkin • Writer: Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Strong, Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku
USA • 1hr 52mins
Opens Hong Kong October 8 • IIA
Grade: B
One of the strangest movie trends of recent memory has arrived. The Autumn of the Tech Bro Takedown (let’s face it, not likely) was entirely predictable considering a handful of rich dudes is trying to rule and profit from us, their AI promised land is increasingly revealing itself to be an unprofitable circle jerk that’s not really helping anyone while it burns the world down, and creative, analytic people were always going to see right through it. They also don’t need it. Clustered together in the next few months are Alex Gibney’s epic biodoc of Elon Musk, erm, Musk; a profile of the only Tech Sis, Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, whose trailer is mind-melting; Luca Guadagnino’s famously executed by Amazon OpenAI pic about Sam Altman, Artificial; and Danny Boyle’s tech bro-adjacent Ink, about Rupert Murdoch’s commitment to the rage-bait that now feeds The Algorithm.
Kicking off this unofficial franchise is Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, the de facto sequel to David Fincher’s 2010 Mark Zuckerberg biopic-ish thing The Social Network (Andrew Garfield smashing a laptop and spitting out “Lawyer up" never gets old) that proves why Sorkin is a writer and why someone with Fincher’s eye for visual storytelling is needed to give his heavy-handed, California/New York establishment democrat words some much needed nuance. The Social Reckoning is an okay journalism movie, even if it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, but weak tea as far as holding Meta billionaire and pro-fascist capitalist Mark Zuckerberg’s feet to the fire.
She’s not dead yet
Spanning the roughly two years leading up to (then) Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s (Jeremy Strong, weird) testimony at US Senate hearings in 2021 – ostensibly to address Facebook’s outsized influence on elections, political advertising, radicalisation and hate speech – ask Rohingya folks in Myanmar how that works – Reckoning starts with Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen (Oscar winner Mikey Madison, Anora) watching in horror as an old friend (Portia Doubleday, terrifyingly awesome) goes all MAGA on two cops, one Black, one Latina, and whines about white discrimination on a Facebook group. At work the next day, Frances is shut down time and again when she tries to point out what the data sets are telling her about targeted posts and radicalisation. A year or so later, the personality-free yet wholly unlikeable Zuck is being coached by an army of crisis managers, chief among them Raya (Wunmi Mosaku, delivering some incredible side-eye) and brutally honest and ethical past investor Charlie (Bill Burr), on how to make the Senate like him. In between Frances can’t take the stress of what she knows is wrong and turns whistleblower, leaking thousands of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, BTW) reporter Jeff Horwitz (The Bear himself, Jeremy Allen White) showing what Facebook knew, and when it knew it. It’s a digital Big Tobacco, and its ends with DC riots on January 6, 2021 stoked by Donald Trump via social media that Facebook hemmed and hawed over finally taking down late in the day. Where it really ends is with Horwitz starting the Facebook Papers investigative series.
The Social Reckoning is two films in one, with the journalistic crusade the stronger of the two. It’s no All the President’s Men, but White brings all his Carmy-esque contemplation to bear on the proceedings, respectfully guilting Frances into action despite her insistence she’s not out to “get” Facebook and cowing in the presence of an incredible Betty Gilpin as Kris, the WSJ’s San Francisco bureau chief. Can we get a movie about her acerbically dedicated news editor? Please?
The other film is an interrogation of Facebook’s ethics and how the platform became an unwieldy beast Zuck couldn’t rein in. In modern lexicon a reckoning can imply a personal, ground-shaking realisation of one’s own complicity in something super, super shitty and then some form of payment for it, at the very least confrontation of some very unpleasant truths. The Social Reckoning does none of that with Zuckerberg – at whose feet much of the shitshow we’re living through right now can be demonstrably laid – and in some ways makes the Meta monster into something honourable in his moral absolutism, at least as it pertains to “free speech.” But Zuckerberg is wrong, and his gross company that too many people still think is the entirety of the Internet is a prime target for basic tort law: his product does damage to consumers, and he/it needs to pay. Fincher may have been able to visualise that, but Sorkin doesn’t have his filmmaking flair; the language he’s most comfortable with is written. On top of that, this isn’t the Sorkin of The West Wing. This is the high and mighty centrist liberal Sorkin that’s a stone’s throw from membership in the same country clubs as Zuckerberg. His teeth are turning into dentures.