The Social Reckoning
What a massive disappointment.
There’s been a rhetoric going around for a while now that writer Aaron Sorkin shouldn't work with director Aaron Sorkin but I don't think any director would've saved this script, which is his worst screenplay... ever?
For a movie that is dealing with events that happened so recently, and we are still feeling the ripple effects, it weirdly feels old and dated already. The revelations that the film presents are all things we know.
A large portion of the film hinges on you wanting to discover why Facebook has caused these extremist points of view, but if you're living in the world right now, you already know what's happened. Shares and reposts were prioritised over likes, if you use social media you already know this. But the movie treats these things like revelations as if you are unaware that this stuff is happening.
This is too important a story. I don't think any of us can fathom how fundamentally different our lives are because of Facebook and for the film to just reduce this to essentially a basic journalism story is such a disappointment.
What makes The Social Network so special has nothing to do with Facebook. It is a character study of Mark Zuckerberg and what pushes him to create something like he does. The performances and the characters here feel weightless. They are exaggerated caricatures that I just couldn't get behind.
Mikey Madison's portrayal of Frances Hogan is actually laughable. It is reductive, it is caricaturish, it is genuinely some of the worst writing of a woman I've seen in a mainstream film this year. What's so disappointing is that this is based off a real life person, and also she is poised to be the most interesting character in this film. It's so interesting inside of her that this dichotomy exists between loving what Facebook could be and then what it actually is. but instead the movie reduces her to a nerdy, socially awkward woman, who has some sexiness thrown in.
It didn't feel like there was anything going on underneath the surface. When it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jeremy Strong, it feels cartoonish and weightless. and when the film is positing that this man has has had such destruction on society, it's really hard to get behind that idea when the performance doesn't seem to feel as heavy as the situation requires
Just a massive disappointment and it really comes down to the screenplay. It’s simplified and reduced down the ideas that the film is trying to tackle, which are deeply important, into a nice little package, and in doing so, it scrubs it of all the nuance and depth that I think a story like this should have