The Social Reckoning

A crackling whistleblower drama that excoriates the algorithm-driven world of Facebook/Meta/Instagram for the way it imperils nations, societies, communities and individuals struggling with disaffection and disinformation, The Social Reckoning sees writer Aaron Sorkin return (this time with directorial responsibility added on) to the turf that he trod in The Social Network (2010). He hits his target hard enough when the darts land right. When they don’t, this standalone follow-up, which rests to a great extent on the shoulders of Jeremy Strong stepping in for Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, is projected as a sort of cold-hearted corporate scalawag chasing revenues no matter what the price of the pursuit is.

Explaining the theory on which Facebook’s News Feed is based, Mark Zuckerberg once said: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” What he didn’t say was that Facebook algorithm could well determine what seems closer – your front yard or Africa. ‘We’re way past making friends,’ as The Social Reckoning’s tagline says. Way past, that is, The Social Network, whose Zuckerberg was about to found Facebook, and who was this mesmeric awkward, brash, nervous genius who may not have got many likes, but whom you could not scroll past.

Imagine being such a distinct storyteller that your last name is synonymous with a whole language of film-making. It’s a privilege reserved exclusively for directors: Tarantino-esque, Spielbergian, Lynchian. But Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriter solely responsible for the cinema of ‘Sorkinisms’: a style of dialogue and atmosphere where humans speak faster than they think, flaunt intellectual credibility, exchange smug repartee without a single stutter, do deadpan jokes in a hurry, react without listening, unleash crowd-pleasing one-liners, and demonstrate robotic comfort with one another.

Sixteen years ago, The Social Network succinctly captured a fledgling Facebook making its journey from campus dorm to corporate corridor via courtroom, with Aaron Sorkin’s razor-sharp screenplay and David Fincher’s focused direction exploring universal questions of social media connection and subsequent human isolation. Jesse Eisenberg played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as both arrogant opportunist and conflicted underdog, with the film being regarded as a modern classic. The Social Network was kinetic and full of kick, capturing the zeitgeist of Facebook’s inception and the double deals that brought it into millions of homes.

There is, of course, the famous nightclub scene, with Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake shouting to make themselves heard above the music. But you could even look at the opening of The Social Network, a brilliant, barbed five-minute conversation between Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg and Rooney Mara as the girl about to break up with him, which sets into motion the events that’ll lead to the creation of Facebook. What’s key is how much Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue gains from the distortion director David Fincher creates around it, movement both within the scene and in the cutting, and a rude babble of background noise. Do this in a room with just two actors and it’d be half the scene.