‘The Social Reckoning’ movie review: Aaron Sorkin can’t optimise the MSIs in his (Meta)stisised Facebook Files slop

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

Tech CEOs are among the most terrifying products of 21st-century civilisation, largely because we have somehow convinced ourselves willingly or otherwise, to vest unprecedented political and cultural power in a bunch of sniveling men whose only qualification for exercising it is the pathological inability to imagine a world in which they are not the most important person in the room. Naturally, October has become 2026’s month to literalise the horrors of Silicon Valley, with Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman sketch Artificial , Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary Musk , Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes project You Can See Everything , and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning lining up to anatomise this peculiar species of megalomania. Of the four, Indian audiences have only been subjected to Sorkin’s contribution so far.

Returning to the Facebook empire he helped immortalise in David Fincher ’s impeccable The Social Network , the screenwriter turned writer-director has inherited a sequel nobody asked for after failing to secure either Fincher in the director’s chair or Jesse Eisenberg back as the Harvard sociopath who built a multi-billion dollar corporation out of his social inadequacies. Unfortunately, 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.

Released in 2010, The Social Network was one of the decade’s most conspicuous Best Picture casualties, losing the Academy Award to The King’s Speech despite its fantastic screenplay and Fincher’s immaculate formal style. Sixteen years later, Sorkin is drawn back to the company’s sins through the Facebook Files — the Wall Street Journal ’s 2021 investigative series, which drew on internal documents to expose how Facebook’s own research identified the harms associated with its products, while the company struggled to address problems involving misinformation, political polarisation and the recommendation algorithms that funnelled users towards increasingly extremist content.

Mikey Madison plays Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who leaks internal material to investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), while Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) prepares for congressional scrutiny with the assistance of crisis manager Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) and argues over content moderation with former associate Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr).