And it’s the lack of the two that leaves its new follow up, The Social Reckoning, feeling pretty flat. Sorkin directs his own writing here. He’ll never be mistaken for being as distinctive a director as he is a writer. Not a big surprise the new movie is typically flat and simply staged. Those are the aesthetic decisions, or lack thereof, you’d make if all you wanted to do was letting writing and performance take center stage. But what’s most surprising is how the writing falls short, too. For all his idiosyncratic tendencies, Sorkin can write verbal pyrotechnics as well as anyone. Here it’s all expositional with a light dusting of the chewy self-righteous monologues for which he’s best known. It’s thinner and more utilitarian, more interested in making its points than building its world. If the first film couldn’t go more than a couple minutes without a memorable line, building complicated characters through a hurtling startup story in action, this one’s mostly about people explaining things to each other when they aren’t clicking around.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a villain lurking in a subplot, caring more about preserving power and time users spend on his site than the social consequences of the platform he runs. He’s played by Jeremy Strong, a good substitution from the original’s Jesse Eisenberg, if only because Eisenberg can never totally remove likability, or at least easy charisma, from his screen persona. Strong plays him as a total blank cocooned from real pushback and warped by a core belief shaped by oppositional defiance. He takes any criticism as impetus to get even worse. If the earlier movie was about how one young man’s antisocial tendencies were inflicted upon the rest of us, the follow-up’s Reckoning is all about what’s happening to the rest of us 20 years on. This movie’s mainly about a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) contacting an investigative reporter (Jeremy Allen White) to raise alarm about internal studies that show harmful effects of Facebook and its assorted social media products. He asks questions. She sneaks documents. Repeat. Meanwhile Zuck preps for a senate hearing with the help of friendly (Wunmi Mosaku) and combative (Bill Burr) interlocutors. All the while, COVID and the January 6th riots loom in the near future as the movie cuts between 2019 and 2021.
The movie’s not particularly equipped to do anything with all these potentially provocative and productive juxtapositions other than asserting that social media is a social ill. It so obviously is, and it is nice to rehearse the reasons why. We’ve hooked our society and our economy up to these machines that pump poison into the body politic, accelerating radicalization and bullying and the collapse of objective truth. That’s a project that happens to flatter certain would-be authoritarians in our corporate-political landscape. And it leaves the rest of us worse off. But despite this movie’s good intentions and research, the project doesn’t work as drama or as documentary. It’s a pleasantly mediocre hybrid, flattering the assumptions of people who walk in ready to be just as angry. And even they might be surprised how sedate and surface-level the results are here.
