{"id":924230,"date":"2026-10-07T16:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/924230\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T16:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T16:48:10","slug":"the-social-reckoning-review-aaron-sorkins-dreadful-facebook-follow-up-should-be-de-friended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/924230\/","title":{"rendered":"The Social Reckoning review: Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful Facebook follow-up should be de-friended"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

While Jeremy Strong gives over his entire self to play the role of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, it is still not enough, Hertz writes.Leah Gallo\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

The Social Reckoning <\/p>\n

Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin <\/p>\n

Starring Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong<\/p>\n

Classification 14A; 112 minutes<\/p>\n

Opens in theatres Oct. 9<\/p>\n

It is not particularly hard to hate Facebook. <\/p>\n

Indeed, it wouldn\u2019t take a Harvard scholar par Winklevoss to make the case that Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s social-media behemoth just might be the 21st century\u2019s most disastrous invention, an addictive vessel of late-stage capitalism that feeds on and amplifies humanity\u2019s very worst instincts. The fact that I can\u2019t even share this movie review on Facebook because of the corporation\u2019s bully-like beef with the Canadian government doesn\u2019t help its cause. But really, you don\u2019t have to go searching for reasons to disavow the service. The experience of using Facebook is the case against Facebook. <\/p>\n

All of which makes writer-director Aaron Sorkin\u2019s new movie, The Social Reckoning, an astounding piece of cinema. Over the course of just 112 minutes, Sorkin\u2019s docudrama tracing Zuckerberg\u2019s corporate malfeasance in the early 2020s will turn even the most hardcore Facebook hater into a true-blue Facebook believer \u2013 the film is just that magnificently, unbelievably, despicably bad. <\/p>\n

To understand why \u2013 to fully comprehend how someone could make a movie so inept that it will have you rooting for Big Tech \u2013 you first need to know that The Social Reckoning is, despite all pretenses and marketing materials to the contrary, not a genuine sequel to The Social Network. That 2010 film was, in the hands of director David Fincher and his varsity-league cast, one of the great movies of the past quarter-century, a gorgeously shot, technically innovative, brilliantly performed, and ambitiously layered tour through our culture\u2019s descent into social-media hell. The Social Reckoning might share a screenwriter in Sorkin, and an ostensible subject in Facebook, but comparing the two movies is akin to comparing apples to Apple. One is a giant world conqueror, the other is a bushel of slowly rotting fruit.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The new film\u2019s problems start, and largely stop, with Sorkin, who decided to direct his own script this time rather than enlisting someone who knows what they\u2019re doing. Shooting the film like a particularly lazy direct-to-streaming movie \u2013 all simple camera set-ups, overexposed lighting, and blocking that recalls a high school\u2019s unauthorized staging of A Few Good Men \u2013 the guy can\u2019t even nail down a simple walk-and-talk scene, the supposed signature of any Sorkin production, from The West Wing through Moneyball. As a result of this aesthetic incompetence, even the sharpest Sorkin lines, of which there are precious few here, feel dulled and flattened. <\/p>\n

This becomes a particular problem once the film sets up its narrative, which is as loose and tedious as The Social Network\u2019s was tight and riveting. Mostly, this is a journalism thriller, with much of the action centred on a real-life pair of anti-Facebook heroes: Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White) and data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). Disillusioned by Facebook\u2019s evolution from a relatively benign community platform to an online fire hose flooding the internet with hate and deception, Haugen goes full whistle-blower, helping Horwitz report a series of blistering investigations that threaten Zuckerberg\u2019s empire. <\/p>\n

But while Sorkin thinks that he\u2019s writing something on the level of All the President\u2019s Men or Meet John Doe \u2013 even having the characters at one point name-check Woodward and Bernstein, and later running down the highlights of Frank Capra\u2019s canon \u2013 the filmmaker is actually conjuring up an insufferably sanctimonious fantasia of blue-state boomers. It is almost as if Sorkin is actively testing his audience\u2019s tolerance for self-righteous didacticism. <\/p>\n

A late-film swerve into the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, for instance, is so eye-rolling in its conception and hacky in execution that you begin to question just whose side of the political aisle Sorkin is on anyway. This is the kind of hoary pap that threatens the fabric of American democracy, forget any dudes sporting MAGA caps. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning. Much of the film’s action is centred on a real-life pair of anti-Facebook heroes: Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by White) and data engineer Frances Haugen (played by Madison).Leah Gallo\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

The sheer insufferability of Sorkin\u2019s sensibilities unfortunately extends to the real-life people that the filmmaker is purporting to champion. The thuddingly bland relationship between Horwitz and Haugen, who are afforded exactly one character trait apiece (he\u2019s a Luddite, she\u2019s a nerd) and forced to deliver long monologues about such scintillating topics as \u201cuser engagement\u201d and \u201cmeaningful social interactions,\u201d makes it hard to believe that the characters originated from the same mind that gave such prickly life to The Social Network\u2019s rebels and rabble-rousers. There is one date-night-at-a-bar scene that is such a blatant, sloppy riff on the pub-set spat that opens Fincher\u2019s film that 2010-era Sorkin should consider suing current-day Sorkin. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, neither Horwitz or Haugen get any lift from a sleepwalking White or an annoyingly twitchy Madison, the latter of whom should hold onto that Academy Award for Anora extra tight these days. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse, though, than Sorkin\u2019s hammy vision of the people who populate a 2020s-era newsroom \u2013 one that is even more cringey and out-of-touch than, well, The Newsroom \u2013 is his new, but far from evolved, approach to Zuckerberg. Swapping out Jesse Eisenberg for Jeremy Strong, Sorkin\u2019s updated Zuck is conceived as a Benjamin Button-like creation, a man-child trapped in the body of a child-man. Or maybe it\u2019s closer to Martin Short\u2019s intentionally obnoxious arrested-development work in Clifford. <\/p>\n

Either way, Strong gives over his entire self to the role and it is still not enough. The actor, who must be suffering some version of Sorkin-holm Syndrome (after his previous collaborations with the director on Molly\u2019s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7) simply cannot overcome the faux-clever dialogue and dead-on-arrival direction that he is handed. <\/p>\n

By the time a self-satisfied and hilariously long coda of text fills the screen before the end credits \u2013 at which point composer Alexandre Desplat\u2019s score fully tips over into self-parody, a dispiriting follow-up to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019s piercing work on Fincher\u2019s film \u2013 the movie unintentionally recalls and then subverts one of Sorkin\u2019s very best lines. If Aaron Sorkin was the inventor of The Social Network, he\u2019d have invented The Social Network. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: While Jeremy Strong gives over his entire self to play the role of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,17262,2922],"class_list":["post-924230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-film-review","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}