The Social Reckoning

The Social Reckoning is, by design, hard to get wrong. As in any whistleblower thriller, the cloaks-and-dagger tone makes it pacey and rhythmic; the stakes are considerably high... However, the movie's messaging is a little too dated to seem clever. We're way past the fake-news and misinformation and online-fascism epidemic, well into the dystopian AI and jobs-ending age, so the movie faces an uphill battle in terms of 'revealing' an urgent conspiracy.

There's a bar scene in The Social Reckoning, a sequel to the 2010 film that's written and also directed by Sorkin. This too is a date gone wrong, though if it's meant as a callback, it doesn't insist upon itself. But there's another scene much later, with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) talking to Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee turned whistleblower. Though they're outside, in public, surrounded by vacationers, there's barely any din.

Sorkin's directorial instincts remain so woefully underdeveloped that even the sharpness of his own dialogue seems to lose its lustre the moment he puts it in front of a camera. For a Hollywood-scaled exposé to ostensibly lay bare Meta's role in the industrial-scale monetisation of public dysfunction and radicalisation, this is a spectacularly anaemic reckoning with the greed, negligence and political harm that Zuckerberg has perpetuated.

Yet, The Social Reckoning comes across as a bit too righteous in its pursuit, causing it to never really utilise its material's dramatic potential. Sorkin's attempt removes the psychological element almost entirely from the picture. What is left behind consequently is a bare-bones story that is earnest, no doubt, but without any allegorical complexity it ought to have.

The film acknowledges the persistence of Facebook’s problems, but does not fully reckon with how much the technological landscape has changed.