Connection lost: "The Social Reckoning"

Hollywood has got its wires crossed again. Aaron Sorkin wanted David Fincher to direct his latest script, it being the sequel to 2010's The Social Network, which Fincher directed. Fincher, however, was busy at Netflix, directing one of Quentin Tarantino's cast-offs, so Sorkin decided to direct The Social Reckoning himself. Such is the dishevelment of the studio system in 2026: everyone has ended up in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Flash back to 2010, and you'll remember The Social Network was something like Peak Fincher, the work of a former pop promo tyro using his mastery of sound, vision and editing to craft a film as addictive as its social-media subject. (I remember the quiet buzz of a packed public preview the night before the film officially opened: the audience, for once, glued to one big screen, collectively humming like a data centre.) When that much-feted project failed to land Fincher the awards he had so conspicuously been working towards with TSN and its immediate predecessors (2007's Zodiac, 2009's Benjamin Button), that was it: there followed a half-decade of the director giving the public what he felt they wanted (2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2014's Gone Girl) before he took the Netflix dime on the grounds it was the path of least resistance. The tardy sequel that follows without him falls instead to a writer still best known for his TV work and a decidedly B-team cast of TV faces (few of whom have been proven to work on the big screen), so it's perhaps little surprise it should seem like a TV movie of sorts, perfunctorily and artlessly recreating the real-world circumstances whereby whistleblower Frances Haugen (played here by Anora's Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) came to expose the fact Facebook was actively radicalising its users. Not since 2010's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has a sequel been more deleteriously overshadowed by what's come before. Where the first film was sharp and snappy, a Facebook movie for the age of Twitter (RIP), this follow-up is creaky and clunky, a Facebook movie modelled after a Western Union telegram.

One issue Sorkin never overcomes is that Reckoning tells an intrinsically less compelling story. The first movie's drama was interpersonal, Fincher working against the televisual neatness of Sorkin's writing by pitting his capable actors against one another in interesting, involving ways. (The Social Network may still be as close as anybody's got to filming Donna Tartt's beloved novel The Secret History.) Reckoning's story is more heavily informational, relying on regular data dumps and exposition, on mouthpiece-characters explaining who they are and what they do for a living. As yet another such figure pops up, you realise one reason the Musks and Zuckerbergs of this world have so far got away with as much as they have is that their excesses and crimes are very hard to describe without putting the layman (and any jurist) to sleep; their brand of sociopathy, switching ones and zeroes on a whim, is banally algorithmic and data-driven. The first movie had characters, personalities who took carefully defined shape before your eyes, every cut serving as a screen refresh: what Sorkin wrote was matched (perhaps even improved upon) by who Fincher cast and what those actors did with their roles. The connections held, and the electricity powering the whole project flowed from film to viewer: we, too, felt plugged in. Here, everything proves far fritzier, starting with Sorkin's casting. Madison obviously represents hot casting in the wake of her Oscar win, but she seems young even for an idealistic Facebook wonk; Sorkin has to resort to putting glasses on her and a stock soaring score under her climactic speech in the hope of lending her words the necessary weight. (The mind inevitably drifts back towards Rooney Mara in the Fincher film, older and wiser than her years.) White stolidly holds down the Sorkin position: his Horwitz is a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic who prefers paper maps to Waze, knows the words to the songs of Show Boat and is so resolutely offline he has no idea how Protonmail works. Yet he remains an altogether bland hero, where the Andrew Garfield character in TSN had skin in the game, often appearing as disgusted by himself as he was by anything Zuckerberg did.

Jeremy Strong's Zuck, meanwhile, is another of this actor's very sharp yet ever so slightly joyless impersonations. He sure looks the part - like a gym-hardened Roman emperor, both his profile and his bearing crying out to be minted on coins - yet he's been characterised as a villain in the old-school sense: no longer the wayward prodigy Jesse Eisenberg so brilliantly captured, this Zuckerberg is a made man, someone long gone down his chosen path, someone who has himself had all the empathy radicalised out of him. All we can do during his scenes is boo (or hit the thumbs-down emoticon); it doesn't help that the character has been cordoned off in the section of the film that most resembles a Sorkin stageplay, where we find him being briefed by his advisors as to how to respond to the heroes' accusations. Just from a dramatic perspective, it's a letdown that he never comes face-to-face with the outside world represented by Horwitz and Haugen: true to life though this may be, it leaves us feeling some vital connection, some motivating spark, has been lost. In isolation, Sorkin can still write a funny line, a good scene, a neat payoff, but this Sorkin is the Sorkin of The Newsroom, trying to set the world to rights with the tricks and tropes he picked up from the scribes of his youth, oblivious to the fact the world and its algorithms have moved on. Fincher the agitator determined to mess with that syntax and punch up the underlying conflicts, but Sorkin's direction is merely content to underline everything he'd earlier set down at the word processor. (I can't be certain what Fincher would have made of the scene here where Sorkin mansplains mansplaining, but the results would almost certainly have been less self-satisfied.) The Social Network remains significant, because it demonstrated that even as recently as sixteen years ago, with the Marvel corporation gearing up for global hegemony, a major American studio could still rally its creative resources and deliver a state-of-the-art movie that engaged the general public. When I came to see The Social Reckoning on the final day of its opening week, by complete contrast, I was the only person in the cinema. As a literalisation of where social media has left us, that cannot be beaten. But it also suggests Aaron Sorkin could no more recapture the zeitgeist in 2026 than I could be the next James Bond.

The Social Reckoning is now showing in selected cinemas.