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                    "Prior to its 2010 release, a much-held suspicion about \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was that it was too soon for a film about Facebook. In a way, it was. At a time when most of us were still avidly adding friends on the platform, it felt like the story wasn\u2019t yet complete. But that\u2019s what made David Fincher\u2019s pristinely crafted, coolly perceptive film so riveting, and so urgent: A compelling origin story, it also sounded a clear warning that Facebook, as benignly as we may have used it, wasn\u2019t itself benign, and the man behind it, even less so. 16 years later, with \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d the previous film\u2019s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is out to tell us that he was right all along. The difference, this time, is we already know that.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tWhere \u201cThe Social Network\u201d came to feel, if anything, even more exhilaratingly prescient with the passage of time, a certain air of \u201ctoo little too late\u201d hangs over \u201cThe Social Reckoning.\u201d A diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination of how Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, well, lost face, it covers events between the years 2019 and 2021 \u2014 and winds up playing as a veritable period piece, so drastically have the tech-wars stakes shifted and expanded in the half-decade since then. \n\n\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s film covers, in measured procedural detail, the story of how Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), with the aid of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), uncovered awful truths behind the platform\u2019s algorithmic support of extremist political groups and its complicity in Instagram\u2019s detrimental effects on young users \u2014 as methodically detailed, among other horrors, in Horwitz\u2019s series of expos\u00e9s titled \u201cThe Facebook Files.\u201d It extends to Haugen\u2019s powerful testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and ties things off there, on a rare, rousing instance of truth being spoken to power. (With a side cheer for the value of old-school shoe-leather journalism.) \n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tBut if many viewers will be largely caught up on what happens in \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d they\u2019ll also be au fait with what has happened since \u2014 and in the year 2026, with Facebook still an unregulated hive of toxic misinformation, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the game on all fronts, the film\u2019s note of stopgap triumph is quaint at best, and hardly satisfying. It\u2019s a reminder that \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was both Sorkin\u2019s best writing achievement and, with its dominant note of queasy, unresolved anxiety, his least characteristic; a fine fit for Fincher\u2019s particular brand of sharp, shadowy mood-mongering, here conspicuous by its absence. The new film sporadically nods to its predecessor\u2019s dark, charged quiet, but with Sorkin in the director\u2019s chair this time, the speechifying idealist of \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cThe Triumph of the Chicago 7\u201d prevails. (Frank Capra even gets a cross-generational namecheck.) We aren\u2019t buying it.\n\n\n\n\n\tIt begins with an isolated, fictional prologue that, give or take some updated technology, recalls Paul Haggis\u2019 \u201cCrash\u201d in its button-pushing. A young white woman, Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), is approached by Black and Latina police officers on the side of a busy road, as she waits for the AAA to attend to her broken-down vehicle; she reacts hostilely to their initial offer of assistance, and the encounter rapidly escalates into a racialized confrontation, as she hurls racist hate speech at the cops, filming them on her phone all the while. Shortly afterwards, she uploads the footage to Voice of Reason, a white-supremacist Facebook group, where it\u2019s spotted by Haugen, a junior product manager on Facebook\u2019s short-lived civic integrity team. The twist? Kayleigh is a former friend of hers, and a former liberal to boot.\n\n\n\n\n\tClearly calculated to sidestep any latter-day discourse about police corruption, it\u2019s a punchy but schematic opening salvo, boldfacing the issue of how social media has the power to radicalize moderate minds. The year is 2019, more than halfway into Trump\u2019s first term; Haugen, charismatically drawn by Madison as a GenZ scrapper who still believes in changing the world, perhaps shouldn\u2019t be as shocked as she is by the video. Or by the indifference of her superiors to her meticulously gathered data on how 64% of extremist group joiners on Facebook were driven there by the platform\u2019s recommendation tool, among other grim stats. Facebook\u2019s professed commitment to \u201ccivic integrity,\u201d she learns, is mere public-relations window-dressing: When, in a meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), her team proposes simple safeguarding measures that may cause a 1% drop in engagement, you can guess his answer.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSomeone who is interested in her findings, of course, is Horwitz, a former political journo newly appointed to the WSJ\u2019s tech beat \u2014 and still convincing his icy new boss (Betty Gilpin, of course) that tech is politics in this day and age. Recruiting an initially hesitant Haugen as his inside source helps prove his point; the bulk of the film centers on the push-pull dynamic between the bristly, impassioned, hyper-online young woman and the old-before-his-time luddite reporter, each of whom knows a few hard truths about the world that the other has yet to learn. A kind of sexless quasi-romcom, it\u2019s engagingly played by Madison and White \u2014 who gives Horwitz, written at best as half a character, some weary, baggy-eyed hangdog sincerity \u2014 but it all feels hopelessly old-fashioned relative to the milieu in which they find themselves.\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s script zigzags between their joint investigation and Zuckerberg\u2019s highly defensive preparation for a 2021 Congressional testimony \u2014 the scope of which is disrupted by the Capitol riots, as he\u2019s placed under growing pressure to suspend the outgoing insurrectionist President from Facebook. It\u2019s a hothouse setup, but it never really hits home, in part because Sorkin\u2019s writing can\u2019t resist slick, combative comedy patter \u2014 Zuckerberg\u2019s foils this time are Bill Burr\u2019s Charlie, a former Facebook employee turned skeptical consultant, and Wunmi Mosaku\u2019s tacitly exasperated crisis manager Raya \u2014 and in part because Strong\u2019s amusingly alien interpretation of the founder is so hard to access. In \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly essayed Zuckerberg as a boy sociopath, all nerves exposed as he built his armor; here, as embodied by Strong, he\u2019s reached final form, emotionally constipated to an absurdist degree. There may be some truth to that; dramatically, however, he\u2019s a dead end.\n\n\n\n\n\tWhich, unfortunately, goes for much of \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d a film that maps out the world as we more or less know it, or knew it at the time, but has no reserves of untold tragedy, feeling or surprise. It\u2019s capably mounted, even if Sorkin remains a televisual stylist at heart: Despite working with the original \u201cSocial Network\u201d DP Jeff Cronenweth, he has nothing approaching Fincher\u2019s visual ingenuity, his ability to locate tactile, haunting atmosphere in the sterile, textureless lairs of tech bros and newspapermen alike. Alexandre Desplat\u2019s score, meanwhile, toggles awkwardly between a pale imitation of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019 melancholic lo-fi electronica in the previous film, and the ennobling orchestral themes that mark the filmmaker\u2019s happier place. In \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d Sorkin mourns what Facebook, once an imperfect platform that brought friends together, has become. But his film, in its own less serious way, itself feels a downgrade from what we had before: less human, less candid, less connected."
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                    "Prior to its 2010 release, a much-held suspicion about \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was that it was too soon for a film about Facebook. In a way, it was. At a time when most of us were still avidly adding friends on the platform, it felt like the story wasn\u2019t yet complete. But that\u2019s what made David Fincher\u2019s pristinely crafted, coolly perceptive film so riveting, and so urgent: A compelling origin story, it also sounded a clear warning that Facebook, as benignly as we may have used it, wasn\u2019t itself benign, and the man behind it, even less so. 16 years later, with \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d the previous film\u2019s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is out to tell us that he was right all along. The difference, this time, is we already know that.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tWhere \u201cThe Social Network\u201d came to feel, if anything, even more exhilaratingly prescient with the passage of time, a certain air of \u201ctoo little too late\u201d hangs over \u201cThe Social Reckoning.\u201d A diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination of how Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, well, lost face, it covers events between the years 2019 and 2021 \u2014 and winds up playing as a veritable period piece, so drastically have the tech-wars stakes shifted and expanded in the half-decade since then. \n\n\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s film covers, in measured procedural detail, the story of how Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), with the aid of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), uncovered awful truths behind the platform\u2019s algorithmic support of extremist political groups and its complicity in Instagram\u2019s detrimental effects on young users \u2014 as methodically detailed, among other horrors, in Horwitz\u2019s series of expos\u00e9s titled \u201cThe Facebook Files.\u201d It extends to Haugen\u2019s powerful testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and ties things off there, on a rare, rousing instance of truth being spoken to power. (With a side cheer for the value of old-school shoe-leather journalism.) \n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tBut if many viewers will be largely caught up on what happens in \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d they\u2019ll also be au fait with what has happened since \u2014 and in the year 2026, with Facebook still an unregulated hive of toxic misinformation, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the game on all fronts, the film\u2019s note of stopgap triumph is quaint at best, and hardly satisfying. It\u2019s a reminder that \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was both Sorkin\u2019s best writing achievement and, with its dominant note of queasy, unresolved anxiety, his least characteristic; a fine fit for Fincher\u2019s particular brand of sharp, shadowy mood-mongering, here conspicuous by its absence. The new film sporadically nods to its predecessor\u2019s dark, charged quiet, but with Sorkin in the director\u2019s chair this time, the speechifying idealist of \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cThe Triumph of the Chicago 7\u201d prevails. (Frank Capra even gets a cross-generational namecheck.) We aren\u2019t buying it.\n\n\n\n\n\tIt begins with an isolated, fictional prologue that, give or take some updated technology, recalls Paul Haggis\u2019 \u201cCrash\u201d in its button-pushing. A young white woman, Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), is approached by Black and Latina police officers on the side of a busy road, as she waits for the AAA to attend to her broken-down vehicle; she reacts hostilely to their initial offer of assistance, and the encounter rapidly escalates into a racialized confrontation, as she hurls racist hate speech at the cops, filming them on her phone all the while. Shortly afterwards, she uploads the footage to Voice of Reason, a white-supremacist Facebook group, where it\u2019s spotted by Haugen, a junior product manager on Facebook\u2019s short-lived civic integrity team. The twist? Kayleigh is a former friend of hers, and a former liberal to boot.\n\n\n\n\n\tClearly calculated to sidestep any latter-day discourse about police corruption, it\u2019s a punchy but schematic opening salvo, boldfacing the issue of how social media has the power to radicalize moderate minds. The year is 2019, more than halfway into Trump\u2019s first term; Haugen, charismatically drawn by Madison as a GenZ scrapper who still believes in changing the world, perhaps shouldn\u2019t be as shocked as she is by the video. Or by the indifference of her superiors to her meticulously gathered data on how 64% of extremist group joiners on Facebook were driven there by the platform\u2019s recommendation tool, among other grim stats. Facebook\u2019s professed commitment to \u201ccivic integrity,\u201d she learns, is mere public-relations window-dressing: When, in a meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), her team proposes simple safeguarding measures that may cause a 1% drop in engagement, you can guess his answer.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSomeone who is interested in her findings, of course, is Horwitz, a former political journo newly appointed to the WSJ\u2019s tech beat \u2014 and still convincing his icy new boss (Betty Gilpin, of course) that tech is politics in this day and age. Recruiting an initially hesitant Haugen as his inside source helps prove his point; the bulk of the film centers on the push-pull dynamic between the bristly, impassioned, hyper-online young woman and the old-before-his-time luddite reporter, each of whom knows a few hard truths about the world that the other has yet to learn. A kind of sexless quasi-romcom, it\u2019s engagingly played by Madison and White \u2014 who gives Horwitz, written at best as half a character, some weary, baggy-eyed hangdog sincerity \u2014 but it all feels hopelessly old-fashioned relative to the milieu in which they find themselves.\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s script zigzags between their joint investigation and Zuckerberg\u2019s highly defensive preparation for a 2021 Congressional testimony \u2014 the scope of which is disrupted by the Capitol riots, as he\u2019s placed under growing pressure to suspend the outgoing insurrectionist President from Facebook. It\u2019s a hothouse setup, but it never really hits home, in part because Sorkin\u2019s writing can\u2019t resist slick, combative comedy patter \u2014 Zuckerberg\u2019s foils this time are Bill Burr\u2019s Charlie, a former Facebook employee turned skeptical consultant, and Wunmi Mosaku\u2019s tacitly exasperated crisis manager Raya \u2014 and in part because Strong\u2019s amusingly alien interpretation of the founder is so hard to access. In \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly essayed Zuckerberg as a boy sociopath, all nerves exposed as he built his armor; here, as embodied by Strong, he\u2019s reached final form, emotionally constipated to an absurdist degree. There may be some truth to that; dramatically, however, he\u2019s a dead end.\n\n\n\n\n\tWhich, unfortunately, goes for much of \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d a film that maps out the world as we more or less know it, or knew it at the time, but has no reserves of untold tragedy, feeling or surprise. It\u2019s capably mounted, even if Sorkin remains a televisual stylist at heart: Despite working with the original \u201cSocial Network\u201d DP Jeff Cronenweth, he has nothing approaching Fincher\u2019s visual ingenuity, his ability to locate tactile, haunting atmosphere in the sterile, textureless lairs of tech bros and newspapermen alike. Alexandre Desplat\u2019s score, meanwhile, toggles awkwardly between a pale imitation of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019 melancholic lo-fi electronica in the previous film, and the ennobling orchestral themes that mark the filmmaker\u2019s happier place. In \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d Sorkin mourns what Facebook, once an imperfect platform that brought friends together, has become. But his film, in its own less serious way, itself feels a downgrade from what we had before: less human, less candid, less connected."
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                    "Prior to its 2010 release, a much-held suspicion about \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was that it was too soon for a film about Facebook. In a way, it was. At a time when most of us were still avidly adding friends on the platform, it felt like the story wasn\u2019t yet complete. But that\u2019s what made David Fincher\u2019s pristinely crafted, coolly perceptive film so riveting, and so urgent: A compelling origin story, it also sounded a clear warning that Facebook, as benignly as we may have used it, wasn\u2019t itself benign, and the man behind it, even less so. 16 years later, with \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d the previous film\u2019s screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is out to tell us that he was right all along. The difference, this time, is we already know that.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\tWhere \u201cThe Social Network\u201d came to feel, if anything, even more exhilaratingly prescient with the passage of time, a certain air of \u201ctoo little too late\u201d hangs over \u201cThe Social Reckoning.\u201d A diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination of how Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, well, lost face, it covers events between the years 2019 and 2021 \u2014 and winds up playing as a veritable period piece, so drastically have the tech-wars stakes shifted and expanded in the half-decade since then. \n\n\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s film covers, in measured procedural detail, the story of how Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), with the aid of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), uncovered awful truths behind the platform\u2019s algorithmic support of extremist political groups and its complicity in Instagram\u2019s detrimental effects on young users \u2014 as methodically detailed, among other horrors, in Horwitz\u2019s series of expos\u00e9s titled \u201cThe Facebook Files.\u201d It extends to Haugen\u2019s powerful testimony before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and ties things off there, on a rare, rousing instance of truth being spoken to power. (With a side cheer for the value of old-school shoe-leather journalism.) \n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tBut if many viewers will be largely caught up on what happens in \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d they\u2019ll also be au fait with what has happened since \u2014 and in the year 2026, with Facebook still an unregulated hive of toxic misinformation, and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence changing the game on all fronts, the film\u2019s note of stopgap triumph is quaint at best, and hardly satisfying. It\u2019s a reminder that \u201cThe Social Network\u201d was both Sorkin\u2019s best writing achievement and, with its dominant note of queasy, unresolved anxiety, his least characteristic; a fine fit for Fincher\u2019s particular brand of sharp, shadowy mood-mongering, here conspicuous by its absence. The new film sporadically nods to its predecessor\u2019s dark, charged quiet, but with Sorkin in the director\u2019s chair this time, the speechifying idealist of \u201cThe West Wing\u201d and \u201cThe Triumph of the Chicago 7\u201d prevails. (Frank Capra even gets a cross-generational namecheck.) We aren\u2019t buying it.\n\n\n\n\n\tIt begins with an isolated, fictional prologue that, give or take some updated technology, recalls Paul Haggis\u2019 \u201cCrash\u201d in its button-pushing. A young white woman, Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), is approached by Black and Latina police officers on the side of a busy road, as she waits for the AAA to attend to her broken-down vehicle; she reacts hostilely to their initial offer of assistance, and the encounter rapidly escalates into a racialized confrontation, as she hurls racist hate speech at the cops, filming them on her phone all the while. Shortly afterwards, she uploads the footage to Voice of Reason, a white-supremacist Facebook group, where it\u2019s spotted by Haugen, a junior product manager on Facebook\u2019s short-lived civic integrity team. The twist? Kayleigh is a former friend of hers, and a former liberal to boot.\n\n\n\n\n\tClearly calculated to sidestep any latter-day discourse about police corruption, it\u2019s a punchy but schematic opening salvo, boldfacing the issue of how social media has the power to radicalize moderate minds. The year is 2019, more than halfway into Trump\u2019s first term; Haugen, charismatically drawn by Madison as a GenZ scrapper who still believes in changing the world, perhaps shouldn\u2019t be as shocked as she is by the video. Or by the indifference of her superiors to her meticulously gathered data on how 64% of extremist group joiners on Facebook were driven there by the platform\u2019s recommendation tool, among other grim stats. Facebook\u2019s professed commitment to \u201ccivic integrity,\u201d she learns, is mere public-relations window-dressing: When, in a meeting with Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), her team proposes simple safeguarding measures that may cause a 1% drop in engagement, you can guess his answer.\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\tSomeone who is interested in her findings, of course, is Horwitz, a former political journo newly appointed to the WSJ\u2019s tech beat \u2014 and still convincing his icy new boss (Betty Gilpin, of course) that tech is politics in this day and age. Recruiting an initially hesitant Haugen as his inside source helps prove his point; the bulk of the film centers on the push-pull dynamic between the bristly, impassioned, hyper-online young woman and the old-before-his-time luddite reporter, each of whom knows a few hard truths about the world that the other has yet to learn. A kind of sexless quasi-romcom, it\u2019s engagingly played by Madison and White \u2014 who gives Horwitz, written at best as half a character, some weary, baggy-eyed hangdog sincerity \u2014 but it all feels hopelessly old-fashioned relative to the milieu in which they find themselves.\n\n\n\n\n\tSorkin\u2019s script zigzags between their joint investigation and Zuckerberg\u2019s highly defensive preparation for a 2021 Congressional testimony \u2014 the scope of which is disrupted by the Capitol riots, as he\u2019s placed under growing pressure to suspend the outgoing insurrectionist President from Facebook. It\u2019s a hothouse setup, but it never really hits home, in part because Sorkin\u2019s writing can\u2019t resist slick, combative comedy patter \u2014 Zuckerberg\u2019s foils this time are Bill Burr\u2019s Charlie, a former Facebook employee turned skeptical consultant, and Wunmi Mosaku\u2019s tacitly exasperated crisis manager Raya \u2014 and in part because Strong\u2019s amusingly alien interpretation of the founder is so hard to access. In \u201cThe Social Network,\u201d Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly essayed Zuckerberg as a boy sociopath, all nerves exposed as he built his armor; here, as embodied by Strong, he\u2019s reached final form, emotionally constipated to an absurdist degree. There may be some truth to that; dramatically, however, he\u2019s a dead end.\n\n\n\n\n\tWhich, unfortunately, goes for much of \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d a film that maps out the world as we more or less know it, or knew it at the time, but has no reserves of untold tragedy, feeling or surprise. It\u2019s capably mounted, even if Sorkin remains a televisual stylist at heart: Despite working with the original \u201cSocial Network\u201d DP Jeff Cronenweth, he has nothing approaching Fincher\u2019s visual ingenuity, his ability to locate tactile, haunting atmosphere in the sterile, textureless lairs of tech bros and newspapermen alike. Alexandre Desplat\u2019s score, meanwhile, toggles awkwardly between a pale imitation of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019 melancholic lo-fi electronica in the previous film, and the ennobling orchestral themes that mark the filmmaker\u2019s happier place. In \u201cThe Social Reckoning,\u201d Sorkin mourns what Facebook, once an imperfect platform that brought friends together, has become. But his film, in its own less serious way, itself feels a downgrade from what we had before: less human, less candid, less connected."
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