The Social Reckoning review: the algorithm in the dock

In 2010, The Social Network dissected how Facebook came to be. Sixteen years later, Aaron Sorkin returns for the consequences. The Social Reckoning, which opened in Australian cinemas on 8 October, is billed as a companion piece rather than a sequel, and the difference matters. This is a different story about a very different Facebook, a company so sure of its own power that, in one line of the script, it considers itself "post-government".

The set-up is a duet. Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) is a Facebook engineer who still believes in what the platform set out to be and can't stay quiet about where it's heading. Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) is a Wall Street Journal reporter who barely knows a bit from a byte, which makes him Sorkin's stand-in for the audience: someone learning this world's language as we do. Together they chase the internal documents that became known as "The Facebook Files", while the film moves between the sprawling Facebook campus, the Journal's modest San Francisco bureau and the halls of the US Capitol, and cuts their investigation against Mark Zuckerberg rehearsing for a grilling from Congress. Composer Alexandre Desplat has a line for the result: "epic inside a fish bowl, a fish bowl with a bomb ticking under it."

Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz in The Social Reckoning.

Worth knowing before you go: Sorkin isn't making a documentary, and he says as much. He set out to capture the essence of a moment rather than reproduce real lives exactly, and some of the people circling Zuckerberg, including the crisis-PR strategist played by Wunmi Mosaku, are invented.

My colleague Joel and I caught the Brisbane preview at Reading Cinemas Newmarket, and what struck me first was how well the film explains itself. It runs through the real events in impressive detail and dives into the knotty dynamics of what happened at Facebook without ever losing you, a balance that's harder to strike than it looks. It also gives the story a human pulse: I felt closer to these characters than documentary-style storytelling usually allows.

The humour was a surprise in a story this dark. It's dry, deliberate and often peer to peer, the banter of people who work together, and it earned some really good laughs from us and the rest of the theatre. It also keeps the film from turning into a lecture.

Then there's Jeremy Strong. His Zuckerberg is a phenomenal piece of work, from the look and the voice to the blank stare and the calculated speech, and there were moments when my brain simply stopped seeing Jeremy Strong. It felt like watching Mark Zuckerberg on camera, which is a remarkable thing to pull off when everyone already knows the real face. It's a long way from the Zuckerberg of 2010: this one sits in a glass office with security guards and a bulletproof couch, as Sorkin tells it, a world away from the kids ziplining into a pool in the first film. Strong built a decade-long record of his subject, down to all eight Congressional hearings, and Sorkin says he was never anything but Mark on set.

The Social Reckoning asks what happens when human attention becomes the most valuable thing a company can own, and who answers for it. It is a story about the screen in your pocket that still remembers to entertain: engaging, easy to follow and, yes, funny. It's in cinemas now.

The Social Reckoning is rated M (mature themes, violence and coarse language), runs 112 minutes and is in Australian cinemas through Sony Pictures Releasing. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, it also stars Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen and Bill Burr.

Joel (left) and Nicholas Blake at the Brisbane preview of The Social Reckoning, Reading Cinemas Newmarket.