Some films have such striking ambient gravity they become their own fucking thing.
What do I mean?
The litmus test is simple: you've seen the movie. Maybe once, maybe a dozen times. At some point, another viewing stops being about following the story. You're just switching on its atmosphere and letting it hang around in the background of your own life.
The list is personal, and the criteria are hardly scientific. But if you can't name a single movie you've stopped watching and started inhabiting, you're doing it wrong.
Sure, sometimes that atmosphere gets built across an entire franchise and the expanded opportunity for world building that permits. But plenty of movies manage it all on their own.
And, for a lot of audiences, The Social Network had enough of this magic aura to draw in several surrounding moons.
The Social Reckoning gets us back into the galactic neighborhood. It just never quite makes us want to move in.
That's not to say it fails to recapture any of the original's magic. Far from it. There's plenty to enjoy here, even if Sorkin starts force-feeding us his thesis before we've had much chance to settle into our seats.
Much of Network's moody, restless energy survives, but it feels so much more distant from its central characters. To be fair, the original followed a handful of kids who started something drunk in a dorm room. Now we're watching thousands of adults show up sober at eight in the morning to keep it running. It's hard to give an org chart the same magnetic pull as a grudge match.
Aaron Sorkin, back as writer and now director, seems to recognize this problem. Rather than surrender to this built-in scaffolding, he turns Reckoning into an investigative thriller. Facebook becomes the enormous, largely faceless machine in the background, while the people trying to pry it open are left to supply the human story.
Driving the investigation is a tech noob and The Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, who has a knack for turning a bunch of trademark Sorkin dialogue into a captivating character. He’s nominally unqualified to be investigating a tech company—he’s got no idea how to use his car’s GPS to find his own office—but also has the confidence and analytical mind to probe why that even matters, to the point where his superiors apparently agree that it doesn’t.
He quickly enlists modern Deep Throat Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) who nearly matches him stride for stride, portraying a reluctant whistleblower with a really personal reason for wanting to “help” a company she still thinks she idolizes. She’s a perfect foil to the confident determination projected by White. She's quick to question Horwitz's Luddite tendencies, but just as quick to return to the only person willing to listen to the pitch she's barely managed to get off her note cards before being swallowed up by Facebook's corporate machinery.
Zuckerberg's strangely peripheral role is another puzzle. Jeremy Strong steps into the role vacated by Jesse Eisenberg's career-defining performance with surprisingly little friction. That's partly a credit to Strong's convincing performance, but also a reflection of how comfortably Zuckerberg recedes into the background of a film that's quite openly an indictment of him personally as much as Facebook generally.
The problem with Reckoning when compared to its predecessor is how little we’re made to care about the genuinely damning revelations that are being uncovered. Facebook has, through its quest to retain constant engagement and eyes on feeds, become an algorithm-driven alternate reality where truth is malleable, user-defined, and—in the worst cases—weaponized to radicalize the previously normal friends sitting next to us in spin class. The thing that made Network great was its ability to show the personal side of the story that was bigger than any one person. Reckoning certainly has a story that affects people. But the people living with Facebook's damage are too often reduced to supporting evidence in a story that asks us to invest in the people documenting it.
Like its predecessor, Reckoning still enjoys an embarrassment of riches in its supporting cast, with the always-phenomenal Betty Gilpin and Billy Magnussen among those stealing the screen in limited time.
But Reckoning is ultimately more invested in proving its case than making us feel the consequences of winning it.
Which is the hilariously inescapable fucking irony.
Here’s a movie about a company that perfected the art of keeping people engaged without making them feel connected that leaves us feeling like we’re just scrolling the investigation’s feed. We're entertained. We keep watching. We just never quite care as much as we should.
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