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

Aaron Sorkin’s Meta-sized misfire of synthetic sermonising fails to hold a candle to the brilliance of its predecessor

Updated - October 09, 2026 05:28 pm IST

A still from ‘The Social Reckoning’ | Photo Credit: Sony Pictures

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). Divided into three acts tracing the discovery of Facebook’s internal failures, the investigation that brings them to light, and the political fallout culminating in the January 6 United States Capitol attack in 2021, the film has no shortage of consequential material, but it seems to labour under the delusion that stringing together a series of incriminating revelations and theatrics automatically amounts to compelling cinema.

A still from ‘The Social Reckoning’ | Photo Credit: Sony Pictures

Sorkin’s problem is that he has become so enamoured of his own intellectual and moral authority that his writing has become an elaborate exercise in self-congratulation, with every exchange engineered to ensure that his audience understands not only what he thinks, but how very pleased he is with himself for thinking it. For the man responsible for A Few Good Men, Moneyball, Steve Jobs and most crucially, The Social Network, his gift for tête-à-tête dialogue has dulled its edge. This fourth directorial feature since Molly’s Game, following The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Being the Ricardos, is a particularly dispiriting demonstration of how thoroughly his directorial ineptitude has repeatedly sabotaged his once-formidable screenwriting talents.

With The Social Reckoning, Sorkin is attempting to make sense of a world that has outgrown his understanding of it by returning to a scandal that broke five years ago, and while the Facebook Files remain an damning record of corporate negligence, it almost feels like he has only now discovered that the internet has gone to the dogs. This is nothing but sanctimony masquerading as political engagement, as though exposing Facebook’s crimes and performing the requisite outrage over them were sufficient enough to stave off the collapse of democracy as we know it.