What happens when you make a movie that’s about four years too late on its subject matter? You get The Social Reckoning. At this point in our lives, we all know that social media is a cesspool and that a lot of that is Facebook/Meta’s fault. They chose to act like the silent arbiter and actively push harmful content to people through their algorithm. Over the backdrop of not only COVID-19 but January 6th, The Social Reckoning jumps around from time to time, following the story of Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison). She’s an engineer at Facebook who notices some issues with their content and how the algorithm pushes that content. Her complaints fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) is hired by the Wall Street Journal to write a piece on the tech giant.
Then we’ve got Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), who is in the midst of prepping for a trip to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress to try to stop legislation passing. Those are the central players in the film, surrounding them are Betty Gilpin as Jeff’s boss at the WSJ, Billy Magnussen as a PR person at Facebook, Wunmi Mosaku as a confidant of Zuckerberg’s, and Bill Burr as a former FB employee turned advisor for Zuck.
The film jumps from 2019 to 2021 to 2020 and back and forth throughout the investigation by Horwitz. The performances in the film are all pretty good to great. Strong’s performance as Zuckerberg is the best of the bunch, and he essentially morphs into him. There are scenes here where I thought they were using stock footage of Zuck. It’s that good.
But there’s something that eats away at me about The Social Reckoning.
Did This Script Sit In A Drawer Or What?
Without spoiling anything about the film or how the events unfold, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at certain scenes and sections of this movie. This might possibly be the most “Kamala won the election” written movie that’s out there. What do I mean by that? I mean that it feels like this movie was written for the timeline where Kamala Harris won the 2024 election. It doesn’t mention the current President by name in any form or fashion; it centers around the Facebook coverage of January 6th in its most tense moments, and it ends on a positive note, even though nothing has actually been done about the damage that Facebook and social media have done to us all.
If the message of the movie was simply “social media is legitimately the worst invention in human history,” that would be great. Because it is. But that’s not what the movie is going for; at least that’s not what it feels like it’s going for in 2026. It goes into a territory that feels like a pat on the back. Except as someone watching it, it feels hollow. Has Facebook suddenly switched its brand strategy from pushing outrage bait as hard as possible? No. Have they had to really pay for anything they’ve done in regard to creating a “public square” that radicalizes people one way or the other? No.
So what’s the point?
A PowerPoint Presentation Of A Film
Simply put, The Social Reckoning puts a lot on the audience with jargon and terms that might fly over your head. It certainly did to me. It also presents that information like we’re idiots because the movie routinely calls Horwitz an idiot about tech. That would be fine if there was something in between that broke up the PowerPoint presentation-like pace of the film, but there isn’t. It’s a sexless, aura-less, really drama-less film.
The things surrounding the film and its story, like the performances, the soundtrack, the cinematography, they’re all nice. It at least makes for a film that, while you’re rolling your eyes at some of the things on screen, you can look at something nice. I will say at the very least, Aaron Sorkin’s writing is biting. The dialogue is snappy and easily the best part of the film.
The tagline for the film is “We’re Way Past Making Friends”; maybe it should have been We’re Way Past Being Relevant.
Yes, this is the origin story of all the outrage we see these days, and that’s something that needed to be explored. But it certainly feels like it could have been done in a less self-serving way.
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