The Social Reckoning Review: Frustrating Glimpses of A Better Movie

Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review, Sony | Tagged: the social reckoning

The Social Reckoning Review: Frustrating Glimpses of A Better Movie

The Social Reckoning is frustrating because you can see glimpses of a much better movie when all of the pieces come together, and we really see where this might have worked. 

Published Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:02:10 -0500
by Kaitlyn Booth
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Article Summary

• The Social Reckoning finds Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook drama full of strong ideas but weighed down by flat execution.
• Its non-linear structure adds some momentum, yet the film leans too heavily on exposition over cinematic storytelling.
• Jeremy Strong, Mikey Madison, and Jeremy Allen White deliver solid work, with January 6 scenes providing rare urgency.
• The Social Reckoning never fully lands its timely critique of Meta, missing the impact a story like this demands.

The Social Reckoning is a bit of a slog, focusing far too much on the "tell" rather than the "show," and, ironically, becomes a movie that makes reading articles or books about this topic seem like the better option.

Director: Aaron Sorkin
Summary: Follows Frances Haugen, a young Facebook engineer, who enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to blow the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets.

The Social Network was an interesting little animal of a movie when it was released back in 2010, but to say that the public opinion on Facebook and social media has drastically changed in the last decade and a half might be the understatement of the year. So any follow-up to that film was going to be an entirely different animal, no matter how anyone approached it. The Social Reckoning turns its focus to the Wall Street Journal's 2021 coverage, which came to be known as The Facebook Files. The reports told a disturbing story about what was going on behind the scenes at Facebook, and that was after the story broke that Facebook's own algorithm was radicalizing people at an alarming rate. The film is non-linear as it follows the inception of the articles in 2019, through the research and the pandemic, to publication and the insurrection at the Capitol.

The non-linear storytelling is probably the most cinematic thing about a movie that, save for a few moments here or there, doesn't feel cinematic at all. We're watching a series of conversations over the course of two years, but unlike other films where this is the primary mode of conversation, the writing, directing, and pacing have sucked all of the tension out of the room. It's not because we know what happens, plenty of films are engaging enough that you forget that you know how this ends, but more that the film feels more like a checklist of events rather than a story.

We keep cutting back to Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg as he prepares to testify before Congress, but the scenes seem to exist only to remind us that Zuckerberg is an asshole, and there are plenty of other scenes that show his willful disregard and ego. We didn't need as much of this as we got, but it felt like the film was frantically trying to figure out how to make sure Zuckerberg was in it, because you can't have a Facebook film without that asshole running around. It is a testament to Strong and Jesse Eisenberg that, no matter who portrays Zuckerberg on screen, he always has an endlessly punchable face.

The rest of the cast does a good job with what they are given, specifically Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White, but the supporting cast, which includes Bill Burr, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, and more, is also great. Director and writer Aaron Sorkin clearly has a lot to say about this, but something is getting lost in translation that wasn't there in the first film. The film builds as we move through multiple timelines, culminating in the final moments before publication and a look at how Facebook reacted to the January 6th insurrection. Those final scenes, with the riot in the background, show Strong's version of Zuckerberg continuing to falter when it really matters, as we watch White as journalist Jeff Horwitz and Madison as Frances Haugen attempt to put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

The problem is, those scenes are just a small piece of the puzzle that is The Social Reckoning. They attempt similar moments, jumping back to Zuckerberg preparing for his testimony as everyone around him learns of the imminent publication of the articles, but none of them hit the way those January 6th scenes do. Perhaps it's because the violence of the insurrection really hammers home the consequences to everyone, rather than the audience being told about them via leaked documents and data points. That sort of storytelling works for a documentary, a book, or a series of news articles, but for a dramatic film, it makes everything lack the all-important punch that this film needed to really get the point across.

The Social Reckoning is frustrating because you can see glimpses of a much better movie when all of the pieces come together, and we really see where this might have worked. However, those moments are fleeting and while everything else around it isn't terrible, it also isn't very good, and when you're tackling a story like The Facebook Files and taking Meta to task seven years later, when it feels like very little has actually changed despite the work that Haugen, Horwitz, and the rest of the journalists at The Wall Street Journal did, being mediocre and missing the mark is a grave misstep.

We need to hold these companies accountable, and most people don't watch documentaries, read books, or engage with long-form journalism. Movies like The Social Reckoning or Primetime matter because they might be the only way some members of the public learn about these things. You have a responsibility to freaking nail it if you're going there, and close very much does not count this time around.

The Social Reckoning

Review by Kaitlyn Booth

5.5/10

The Social Reckoning is a bit of a slog, focusing far too much on the "tell" rather than the "show," and, ironically, becomes a movie that makes reading articles or books about this topic seem like the better option.

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