In the summer of 2003, Real Madrid sold French midfielder Claude Makalélé to Chelsea.
That same summer, David Beckham arrived for a blockbuster fee; the team then failed to win a La Liga title for the next four seasons, while Makalélé became a key part of the all-dominating Chelsea side of the Noughties.
Makalélé’s compatriot Zinedine Zidane was quoted as saying, “why put another layer of gold paint on the Bentley when you are losing the entire engine?”
As it turns out, swapping Makalélé for Beckham is a pretty good frame of reference for replacing David Fincher with Aaron Sorkin.
2010’s The Social Network is regarded as one of the most defining films of the last 20 years and marked the finest hour for both Fincher and Sorkin.
In Mark Zuckerberg, Fincher finally had the ultimate weirdo he could make the audience love and hate, and Sorkin had a system he could sink his teeth into.
The ending of The Social Network is one of the most bleakly funny endings in film history; despite vanquishing his foes in court and having all the money in the world, Zuckerberg keeps hitting refresh and waiting to see if the girl who dumped him has accepted his friend request.
Until now, Hollywood had the common sense to leave it alone and let the movie speak for itself; Sorkin couldn’t help himself and went back to the well.
Sorkin has argued that Zuckerberg deserves another round of public scrutiny and his role in making public discourse more toxic should be put under the microscope.
We argue that Sorkin is not the right choice to make that particular call.
The Social Network (as well as Steve Jobs) work so well because Fincher and Danny Boyle push back against Sorkin’s worst excesses as a writer and force him to meet the director in the middle.
When Sorkin is the sole writer and director, the film suffers.
Aaron Sorkin’s grand thesis statement is that Facebook should have taken a more active and responsible role in moderating political content, should have done more to prevent misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it should have limited political advertising on the platform.
To which we say: we knew this back in 2021, but thank you for reiterating it, Mr Sorkin.
To call The Social Reckoning a sequel to The Social Network isn’t entirely fair; apart from Mark Zuckerberg being a character and Facebook being the setting, it really doesn’t have that much in common with the 2010 movie.
Lacking a great director like David Fincher is the most obvious difference, and the most subtle but crucial difference, Nine Inch Nails aren’t doing the score anymore.
The Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score for The Social Network is one of the all-time great film scores, and you can still detect its influence on film scores to this day.
The Social Network is an endlessly rewatchable movie, and the propulsive score helps the film zip by, lending it this sense of urgency that makes even courtroom scenes exciting.
In The Social Reckoning, the score has been replaced by an anonymous score by French composer Alexandre Desplat, best known for his work with Guillermo Del Toro and Wes Anderson.
When you lose the taut Fincher direction and the sleek Nine Inch Nails score, you lose the engine.
The other big switch from The Social Network is Jeremy Strong replacing Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Mark Zuckerberg.
Eisenberg’s performance as Zuckerberg was perfect; it was snotty and pugnacious, and Eisenberg’s body language conveyed a sense of “I am smarter than everyone, and I will not apologise for it.”
Strong’s interpretation of Zuckerberg leans more into the almost alien-like persona that Zuckerberg has created for himself in recent times.
Similar to his Oscar-nominated performance as Roy Cohn, Strong leans into the prickliness that saw both Cohn and Zuckerberg rise to the top of their professions.
Strong comes away from the film with his integrity intact; the same cannot be said of Jeremy Allen White.
The Bear star has attempted to make the jump from TV to movies, like so many before him; last year saw him play Bruce Springsteen in a film that ultimately went nowhere, and his performance as the Wall Street Journal writer who breaks the Facebook Files is oddly flat.
There is a distinct sense that Allen White is out of his depth as Jeff Horowitz, the journalist who ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for his reportage on Facebook.
As written, the character is out of his depth, but his performance is stilted and flat in a way that a better director would have caught at rehearsal stage.
Jeremy Allen White feels out of place in The Social Reckoning
Anora star Mikey Madison plays Frances Haughen, the Facebook data engineer who ends up blowing the whistle on the dodgy practices deployed by Facebook.
It is easy to play armchair director on casting decisions, but at no stage did someone stand up and say, “wait a second, the character is blonde, why are we casting a brunette actress?”.
Madison, to be fair, does a good job with a poorly written character and adds some warmth and vulnerability to an otherwise icy script.
The film has more in common with the Michael Mann film The Insider than it does The Social Network, to tell the truth (which is actually points in favour in this case, as that happens to be this critic’s favourite Michael Mann film).
In that movie, Al Pacino’s beleaguered 60 Minutes producer tries to get Russell Crowe’s tobacco whistleblower to go on the record, only for the story to take on a life of its own.
About 70% of the movie is about Allen White and Madison gathering evidence against Facebook (along with wrestling with the implications of going on the record and the potential legal ramifications), and the other 30% is Zuckerberg preparing for a Senate hearing, defending Facebook’s role as a “town square.”
In the Zuckerberg scenes, we get a hint of what the film really should have been.
Sorkin dialogue isn’t for everyone, but there is a rhythm and back-and-forth that is undeniable in Jeremy Strong’s delivery of the dialogue.
Fundamentally, the film should have decided if it was going to be about the journalist who broke the Facebook files and developing the story with the Facebook whistleblower, or it should have been about Zuckerberg preparing to testify before the Senate and treating it like a chamber drama.
Instead, the film tries to have it both ways, and it feels off.
That is the one-word review for this film; it feels “off.”
The Social Reckoning is like coming back home after a few weeks on holiday, but all your stuff in the fridge has been rearranged, the couch has been moved, and someone has changed the pre-set channels on the television.
To be clear, the film isn’t the catastrophic failure people expected, but it also falls way short of the expectations it establishes for itself.
Which is perhaps the most fitting fate for this film; it is trying to make the case for why Facebook is still important, more than a decade after people stopped caring about it.