Aaron Sorkin
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The Social Network (2010)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced The Social Reckoning (2026), Molly's Game (2017), The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
Themes
Reflecting on The SOCIAL NETWORK sixteen years after its release, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s collaboration has aged in complex and interesting ways…
David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) stylishly chronicled the goofy and compelling origins of Zuckerberg and Facebook.
Compare that to its thrillingly superior predecessor The Social Network, which climaxes in 2009, just a year before the film’s 2010 release.
With 2010’s “The Social Network”, director David Fincher blew audiences away with his searing retelling of the founding of the social networking website Facebook.
The best and most engaging aspect of this spiritual sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010)…
16 years after The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin says Mark Zuckerberg and co. still don’t know the damage they’ve done in The Social Reckoning.
One of the editors, Alan Baumgarten, worked on David O. Russell’s “ American Hustle ,” a movie that, like “Molly’s Game,” owes a large debt to Martin Scorsese’s native-son crime stories, including “Casino.”
Like 21 and Casino and other gambling biopics, Molly's Game grants you entrance into a glamorous milieu of riches and risk that would never accept you in real life.
What you don’t get here, however, is ironic distance of the sort that Scorsese (along with many imitators) employs in The Wolf of Wall Street, Casino, and elsewhere.
A fascinating rags-to-riches, fall-from-grace narrative, in the vein of Casino (1995), becomes an overstuffed and convoluted spider’s web in need of an edit.
Echoes to Scorsese are aplenty, especially Goodfellas and the criminally underloved Casino, but Sorkin’s script doesn’t have the same tenacity or operatic scope of those films, borrowing the kinetic style and voice overs but lacking the inspired attention to detail and deft, Catholic sensibility about the moral quandaries at play.
The story is a fall of the empire narrative; rags to riches then back to rags — and is broadly reminiscent of Casino or Boogie Nights.
Chicago 10 (2008)
Directed by Brett Morgen
influenced The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
Visuals Plot
It’s a flashback structure reminiscent of the one the filmmaker adopted in The Social Network but also of an earlier film on this subject, Brett Morgen’s exhilarating agitprop documentary Chicago 10 , which tackled the same events with a mixture of archival footage set to modern rock and animated reenactments adapted from the court transcripts.
Morgen’s “Chicago 10” documentary filled that gap with a rotoscoped cast (including an inspired Hank Azaria as Hoffman) and wielded more cinematic ambition when it came to representing the events at hand.
The inclusion of January 6, with people watching a screen à la Newsroom…
…resembling an extended episode of his finger-wagging HBO series, The Newsroom (which I loved)…
…especially after years of being overexposed to his style on The West Wing and The Newsroom…
…something which his least elegant work has sometimes fallen prey to (such as The Newsroom)…
Back in 2012, during a press junket for The Newsroom Aaron Sorkin traded barbs with an interviewer who dared to fight smarm with snark.
Whether it’s A Few Good Men, The West Wing, or The Newsroom, Sorkin has an immense respect for the importance of America’s institutions…
Medium Cool (1969)
Directed by Haskell Wexler
influenced The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
Themes Visuals
The Chicago Seven chapter has inspired numerous films, from Haskell Wexler's docu-fiction treatment of the DNC protests, Medium Cool, through Woody Allen's satirical take on the trial in Bananas, to Brett Morgen's mix of archival footage with animated scenes based on court transcripts, Chicago 10.
He even weaves in footage from Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.
Throw in the civic importance of Medium Cool as a cherry on top.
The Chicago DNC protests began peacefully and erupted into stunningly brutal violence, and Sorkin captures its horror here, weaving in some archival footage in the mode of Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking 1969 fiction-nonfiction blend Medium Cool.
Sorkin’s camera doesn’t move a lot; he’s a front-and-center, time-for-a-closeup technician, and the way he stages and films the riot footage (interpolated with archival video from, among other sources, Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool” ) it’s routine chaos, desperately overscored by composer Daniel Pemberton.
Adding accidental insult to injury is Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming Christmas release Artificial, a superior zeitgeist Silicon Valley monster movie starring a shape-shifting Sam Altman that vacillates between hilarious and harrowing as it chronicles the rise and rise of OpenAI.
Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming comedy “Artificial” about OpenAI’s Sam Altman…
Luca Guadagnino “ate Sorkin’s lunch” in the anti–tech mogul sweepstakes with his reportedly scabrous Sam Altman hit job, Artificial…
…the premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI drama Artificial…
All the President's Men (1976)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
influenced The Social Reckoning (2026)
Themes Plot Characters
At least All The President’s Men, Hollywood’s far more illustrious ode to gumshoe journalism, came out only 20 months after Nixon resigned, and felt like a still-fresh summary statement — a glamorous coda to that long national nightmare.
…trading Deep Throat talking in parking garages for hotel room meetings…
The clearest echoes are not THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but films like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SPOTLIGHT or – the most apt, given the whistleblower angle – Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER.
…a kind of cut-rate “All the President’s Men” in which a whistleblower and a reporter for the Washington Post try and fail to bring down Zuck’s toxic empire of digital influence…
There’s a focus and reliability to his performance that’s reminiscent of a young Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men.
He gives his actors a riff on All the President’s Men (1978) and shouts action.
Frances raises her fist in triumph like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club…
…right down to a fist pump that seems to transport Madison back to The Breakfast Club…
Sorkin’s didacticism is often his own worst enemy, but he mostly keeps his worst instincts in check here, and there are times when he almost seems to channel the great Otto Preminger, whose Anatomy of a Murder is perhaps the gold standard for courtroom dramas.
Except for Mudbound, no recent movie has voiceovers so lengthy and impressive as literature, and critic Manohla Dargis estimates that the script equals the 240-words-per-minute record set by His Girl Friday in 1940.
His Girl Friday, one of the great comedies of the 1940s, is remembered less for what it says, than how it says it.
Chastain and Elba bat dialogue back and forth like they were Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.”
At his best he seems like the natural heir to the crackling screwball sensibility that powered 1940s classics such as His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve .
…especially after years of being overexposed to his style on The West Wing and The Newsroom…
…even “The West Wing” was able to divide those altruistic traits among its cast…
From The West Wing onwards, his explorations of dense, volatile topics through vigorous speech and character are impeccable.
…when The New York Times asked, “What Did The West Wing Do to Us?” in 2024…
…never scintillating, as Sorkin managed on television’s West Wing…
Sorkin has a long history — “A Few Good Men,” “Moneyball,” “Steve Jobs” and on every episode of “The West Wing” he ever touched — of writing words to be spoken by the smartest people in the room…
The clearest echoes are not THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but films like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SPOTLIGHT or – the most apt, given the whistleblower angle – Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER.
His film tries to find a kernel of hope through the story of a whistleblower, sort of like an update of Michael Mann’s The Insider…
“The Social Reckoning” is precisely the kind of movie that “Digger” (2026) ridicules: verbose, intellectual, not meta, and takes no actual action…
As a provocation–slash–conversation piece about big-tech power players trying to control the narrative, it’s no Digger.
But Sorkin doesn’t pull off what, say, Paddy Chayefsky, in his scripts for such films as “Network” and “The Hospital,” achieved.
The poker scene on the train in “The Sting,” the showdown between Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson in “The Cincinnati Kid,” the multi-million-dollar game in “Casino Royale” — all filled with glaring missteps.
The clearest echoes are not THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but films like ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SPOTLIGHT or – the most apt, given the whistleblower angle – Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER.
Where’s this going? Well, into the territory of All The President’s Men and Spotlight, as it turns out.
At his best he seems like the natural heir to the crackling screwball sensibility that powered 1940s classics such as His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve .
There are some slight downfalls of the film such as the ineffective father-daughter subplot that is not properly fleshed out and Kevin Costner is wasted in a role that’s almost akin to William Fichtner’s part in Blades of Glory.
…“disguised” in bizarrely sexy, Anora-esque outfits…
…the joke (surely intentional) is that the wasted white girl in the video sounds more than a little like Anora…
Frances Haugen is played by Mikey Madison who gives a dramatically different performance than her blaring Oscar-winning turn in “Anora”.
Toning down the lap-dancer fire and sneaky intelligence she brought to her Oscar-winning role in “Anora,” Mikey Madison gets all frowny serious…
After displaying such a confident screen presence in Anora, it’s nice to know the Oscar-winner can play the other end of the spectrum.
Fresh off her Oscar in Anora, Mikey Madison plays the whistleblower Frances Haugen…
Watching its many false starts and awkward elements, I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s comment about The King of Comedy: “This is a movie that seems ready to explode – but somehow it never does.”