REEL | Aaron Sorkin Disrupts 'The Social Reckoning'

"Connecting people is a virtous mission."

Sony Pictures / Escape Artists

Academy Award-winning The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin directs the largely unrelated Facebook drama follow-up, The Social Reckoning, based on The Wall Street Journal's 2021 investigation series, "The Facebook Files," exposing the social media giant's horrible manipulation of misinformation for its own profit.

Starring Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White as data engineer turned whistleblower Frances Huagen and technology reporter Jeff Horwitz, we follow their story through the pandemic and insurrection. In a parallel framing, Jeremy Strong's strangely accurate and aloof portrayal of the woefully out-of-touch and steadfastly arrogant Mark Zuckerberg takes place during crisis management sessions as he refuses to moderate any of the destructive material his platform shares while amplifying rage bait and divisive, un-fact-checked news.

Set mostly in rooms with people talking, the supporting cast of Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen, Betty Gilpin, and comedian Bill Burr make it interesting and compelling despite sometimes drab settings of various hotel or meeting rooms. They surround the film's central investigation of proving extreme misdeeds on the part of Facebook's many platforms.

Shot in Vancouver, with UBC standing in for Palo Alto, The Social Reckoning is less of a Facebook or Zuckerberg film than it is a straight-ahead Sorkin journalism procedural drama about exposing the lasting damage of those in power manipulating the public discourse. As such, it succeeds, but its aims are intentionally modest and devoid of much cinematic style or flair. It's a low-stakes, bare-bones legal thriller with all of Sorkin's old-fashioned tricks and ticks that does not really reckon with our broken systems.


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