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The Social Network had no business being the perfect movie it is. Pairing the verbose and optimistic Aaron Sorkin with the frigid and controlled David Fincher? Making a movie about Facebook, an obvious fad only a few years into its popularity? Focusing a lot of attention on nerdy computer guys coding a website? And yet, as a montage of Facebook posts played over a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep” in the first 30 seconds of the trailer, we knew that The Social Network would be something special.
The Social Reckoning offers no such reassurance. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the clip, which does exactly what a good trailer should do. It introduces us to Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who leaked thousands of internal Facebook documents to journalist Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. It also debuts Jeremy Strong as a more aggressive, more powerful Mark Zuckerberg, who once again finds himself on trial, being examined by Wunmi Mosaku, coached by Bill Burr, and smugly mocked by Billy Magnussen.
It all looks like a competent legal thriller, and that’s not at all a bad thing. In the 15-plus years since The Social Network debuted, the types of legal thrillers that used to hit theaters on a monthly basis have all dried up. Since superheroes took over, John Grisham and his ilk have stayed on bookshelves and moviegoers have had to accept Juror #2 as a reasonable facsimile of the middlebrow flicks we used to love.
Moreover, Facebook has only grown more dominant, with AI bots created by foreign governments to make your grandparents nuts replacing the goofy status updates featured in the trailer for The Social Network. We now know Facebook to be a genuinely dangerous part of modern society, not a fun, harmless thing created by a weird misogynist.
Perhaps most importantly, The Social Reckoning arrives in the shadow of The Social Network, a film now fully canonized as one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. The new movie’s trailer couldn’t just grab a different Radiohead song and have its own montage. It had to go in its own direction.
But is this the right direction? Aaron Sorkin’s decision to write and direct the film, without the involvement of Fincher, already puts it under great scrutiny. When he’s on, Sorkin can write some of the most brilliant, sparkling dialogue in all of media. When he’s off—and he’s usually off when he’s directing himself—he’s overbearing, self-congratulatory, and all together exhausting. Throw in Strong’s very literal take on Zuckerberg, a far cry from Jesse Eisenberg‘s more human interpretation, and we have good reason to doubt The Social Reckoning.
Still, this is only one trailer, and not the whole film. And one trailer isn’t enough to judge an entire movie… unless it’s the trailer for The Social Network.
The post The Social Reckoning Trailer Has Already Failed to Live Up to The Social Network appeared first on Den of Geek.
