There was a time when everything Aaron Sorkin’s pen touched turned to gold. There were few who rivaled the writer behind The West Wing and A Few Good Men in the gift of the gab, and even fewer who could make the walk-and-talk seem so electric. And of course, there’s The Social Network, a pitch-perfect screenplay that’s arguably Sorkin’s magnum opus, lent depth and allure by David Fincher’s meticulous direction.
But somewhere in the past decade or so, Sorkin’s works started to lose their shine. Perhaps it was when he returned to TV with the self-satisfied series The Newsroom, a monologue-driven show about how Aaron Sorkin would report news the right way, two years after said news took place. Or perhaps it was when Sorkin stepped behind the camera to start directing his own films, and proved to be a perfectly okay director. Whatever the case, Sorkin’s newest film, The Social Reckoning, falls under both those umbrellas: a dramatization of the events leading up to the publication of The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 Facebook Files that feels neither novel nor all-that-interestingly directed. But The Social Reckoning wouldn’t feel so middling if it wasn’t a clear follow-up to — and drastic downgrade from — the masterpiece that was The Social Network.
