October 8, 2026

THE SOCIAL RECKONING REVIEW: Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful Facebook follow-up should be de-friended.

All of which makes writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Reckoning, an astounding piece of cinema. Over the course of just 112 minutes, Sorkin’s docudrama tracing Zuckerberg’s corporate malfeasance in the early 2020s will turn even the most hardcore Facebook hater into a true-blue Facebook believer – the film is just that magnificently, unbelievably, despicably bad.

To understand why – to fully comprehend how someone could make a movie so inept that it will have you rooting for Big Tech – you first need to know that The Social Reckoning is, despite all pretenses and marketing materials to the contrary, not a genuine sequel to The Social Network. That 2010 film was, in the hands of director David Fincher and his varsity-league cast, one of the great movies of the past quarter-century, a gorgeously shot, technically innovative, brilliantly performed, and ambitiously layered tour through our culture’s descent into social-media hell. The Social Reckoning might share a screenwriter in Sorkin, and an ostensible subject in Facebook, but comparing the two movies is akin to comparing apples to Apple. One is a giant world conqueror, the other is a bushel of slowly rotting fruit.

The new film’s problems start, and largely stop, with Sorkin, who decided to direct his own script this time rather than enlisting someone who knows what they’re doing. Shooting the film like a particularly lazy direct-to-streaming movie – all simple camera set-ups, overexposed lighting, and blocking that recalls a high school’s unauthorized staging of A Few Good Men – the guy can’t even nail down a simple walk-and-talk scene, the supposed signature of any Sorkin production, from The West Wing through Moneyball. As a result of this aesthetic incompetence, even the sharpest Sorkin lines, of which there are precious few here, feel dulled and flattened.

And, as Christian Toto writes, false: The Shocking Misinformation Shared by The Social Reckoning.

We can say President Trump pushed an election narrative that he has yet to prove in a court of law. He holds some responsibility for the violent protest, one that has been weaponized by the Left and the Media (but we repeat ourselves) in ways that warp what really happened that day.

It was still an ugly stain on the country.

We cannot say he told the rioters to keep going or refused to tell them to go home.

But Sorkin can. He just did so in a major motion picture. No film critic will call it out. No Legacy Media outlet will question his narrative, doing the simple Google search to learn what Trump actually posted that day versus what the film alleges.

Some might label that misinformation.

Disinformation? A Sorkin against itself cannot stand! Aaron Sorkin Accidentally Made Mark Zuckerberg the Hero of His Anti-Facebook Movie. “This certainly isn’t what Sorkin intended, but I found myself cheering Strong’s Zuckerberg in a recently released scene from the movie, in which the Facebook CEO marshals free speech arguments to rebut the histrionic apprehensions of Bill Burr’s character:”

UPDATE: John Nolte explores: A Tale of Two Trailers – Why Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Social Reckoning’ Is Projected to Bomb.

The movie only has this to say: Free speech is dangerous! Why aren’t the richest and most powerful elites in the world censoring everyday people? Why aren’t they deciding what opinions we can and cannot see? Why aren’t they controlling the political discussion?

This might be the first Hollywood movie since Gabriel Over the White House (1938) that openly advocates for fascism, that lobbies in favor of the will of the people being squashed for some elite asshole’s misguided ideal of the “greater good.”

That’s never good company for a movie to be in. Or as James Lileks wrote in his 2018 retrospective of the 1938 film, “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.”

Posted at 3:15 pm by Ed Driscoll