Aaron Sorkin directs Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong in this quasi sequel to The Social Network which follows Frances Haugen, who in 2020 blew the whistle on Facebook’s insidious algorithm policy at a crisis point for founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Sorkin is back… which means we get that own brand smart alec / Wikipedia dump dialogue that I’m still a sucker for. But he ain’t the best director of his own screenplays. He lacks Reiner’s everyman storyteller instincts and Fincher’s technical elegance. Fincher isn’t the only key piece of code glaringly missing. Where is Trent Reznor’s famous score? Its elegiac notes hammered home we were watching a dying moment of history, even if those final breaths of analogue interaction were scant months earlier. And Jesse Eisenberg owns the land rights on Zuckerberg. When he said “Not again thank you” that should have put this project back into turnaround. Strong is fine, but he is a more caricatured actor… less human. And we already spent six years watching him play this sort of corporate power wiggler… so no new ground is broken. The movie makes a good précis about everything wrong with Facebook’s influence on our lives over the past decade. But it does skip over free will. We don’t have to choose to act on targeted content that makes us feel, angrier, uglier, disenfranchised, misinformed. There is some human culpability that is being overlooked here. We still have the faculty to check sources, call bullshit… the people who decide not to are making a decision… albeit a dumb one. Almost as if Sorkin doesn’t trust the sheep he sells his art to have the intelligence to interrogate anything rationally anymore. Their feeds (what a word for it) or their ability to follow his equally hectoring narrative. The emotive score and cross cutting to the storming of the Capitol are manipulative choices that drown out Mikey Madison’s grand finale speech. Shame that. She is the best thing in this. A 180 from Anora. But also the plot finds cringe worthy excuses for her to dress sexy. I find leg warmers hot.

6

Perfect Double Bill: The Social Network (2011)