While some stories provide imaginative escape, others are lessons or warnings, inviting us to dive into drama so we might return to our own lives with renewed purpose and impetus to act. Two of the most anticipated films of the fall, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, unfold urgent stories of our shared future, but ask what it means to tell them too late—too late to undo past wrongs, too late to change course, too late to do something with the lesson we might learn.
Digger begins with the eponymous Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aging oil baron with a heavy drawl, caring for his cat, who is clearly dying though Digger won’t admit it. In the middle of this ordeal, he discovers that his drill site in Antarctica—which he has criminally mismanaged—is setting in motion a series of environmental cataclysms. The American president (John Goodman) and his Cabinet descend on Digger’s sprawling mansion to make a plan—not to save a single soul but, rather, to skew global opinion in their favor.
As Digger and President Compson stand and gaze out of a picture window, a tree falls over on its side. It would appear to be another instance of environmental collapse, except that, moments later, a giant human hand reaches out and rights it. Be prepared, for the remaining 90 or so minutes of the movie, to feel left out, to find that you are, by design, the last to know what is really going on.
The Social Reckoning, on the other hand, delivers pretty much what a news-literate Sorkin fan might expect. The sequel picks up over a decade after Sorkin’s The Social Network, in which Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook and looked bad doing it, and critiques Facebook as a global power and an international threat. Sorkin, the screenwriter for both, takes over the directorial reins here from David Fincher, and Zuckerberg is now played by Jeremy Strong. Jesse Eisenberg chose not to reprise the role, telling Variety that he didn’t “want to be associated with that character.” In the film as in life, it’s Zuckerberg’s company and its technology that have taken on a worrying momentum of their own, appearing ever more capable of AI-powered mass destruction. Can a single whistleblower force the hand of a trillion-dollar company and set in motion radical change?
Both Digger and The Social Reckoning begin their stories of ego-fueled disaster at a point in the narrative when it is too late for any of the characters to stop it. They each approach the problem of too-late storytelling from their preferred modes. Sorkin turns in a trademark love letter to journalism, Iñárritu a satire of satire that moves between cerebral and bizarre. Just as Sorkin favors principled stances, stylishly delivered, Iñárritu makes a meal of moral ambiguity, but both films revolve around bad men and a lot of monologuing.
Digger is the story of Digger Rockwell, but it is also a production of a play called Fossil Fools, centered on a character named “Digger Rockwell.” Most of the scenes in the film are in fact rehearsals for that play, and the others show us the drama behind the scenes. That is the film’s first twist, but it isn’t its last, and once revealed, it seems both obvious and impossible. Certainly, the viewer of a play would not witness the proceedings as we do, moving through the rooms of Digger’s mansion (antique, but still tacky), or experience a suspenseful pan from the person looking to what they are looking at. When the production is paused or halted, a network of elaborate, high-resolution screens are moved through space by faceless extras.
It is an unsettling trick, which only partly works. Generously, one might argue that the disorientation is intentional: The vast, inhuman scale of climate change is not just an environmental crisis but a representational one, as writers like Amitav Ghosh have explained. Iñárritu grapples with this in Fossil Fools, when the men in charge can only understand the size of the ice shelf that is racing toward Europe by comparing it to the size of American cities (Philadelphia, Boston). Digger dismisses out of hand the initial crack in the glacier, because it is only 30 times the size of his penis.
At its most lively, though, the play-within-the-play invites us to watch the actors hustle to their marks, scurry off in the darkness, shed their costumes with necessary speed. Goodman plays the most repulsive role in a universe full of stiff competition, a cancer-stricken president who believes himself to be the savior of the world but would be hard-pressed to name his favorite Bible verse. Riz Ahmed turns in the most moving performance as scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh, executing hairpin turns from broad humor to quiet agony; his curtain-call robot dance is also quite good.
Then there’s Cruise, who is tasked with holding together the film’s two plots, and whose star presence is never absent. The indestructible Tom Cruise has been saving the world for decades, most recently defeating an AI antagonist in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. As Digger, he throws back to his roles as a greasy motivational speaker in Magnolia or a foul-mouthed Hollywood executive in Tropic Thunder; they might not have the power to end the world, but they are sure going to make things worse before they go.
But when we see Cruise playing “Curtis Markson,” the actor who plays Digger in the play, we also get a brief look at Cruise as the meticulous, perfectionist, demanding creative who has notes for everyone, even the makeup artist. Of course, it’s a look at, never into, the star himself; it only draws on those elements that the Cruise team would approve (not the other stuff). Over and over, Digger teases us with the prospect of something real, only to offer more stagecraft.
If this sounds like a punishing two hours at the cinema, it’s because the movie probably thinks you deserve it. The play presents the offices of the European Commission as a sterile white set, full of angry extras whom Digger bluntly confronts. You “bask in the comfort of your unsustainable life,” he tells them, adding, “You demand, and I supply!” The figure of Digger is decidedly an antihero, but the mob is fairly repellent too. The European Commission scene feels like a demented Frank Capra fantasy in which Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith goes to Washington in order to drill, baby, drill. No wonder Markson doesn’t know what this play is saying.
“It’s funny and it’s stupid and it’s scary and it makes no goddamn sense!” crows the show’s creepy, red-headed producer (Jesse Plemons). Some of that is true, at least. It is also hostile, clever, too clever, abstract, chilly, angry, and bored. All of this would be forgivable, even impressive, if it was also exciting.
With its layered storytelling and the connections between the play and the mysteriously shrouded present, their present and our own, Digger is more than it seems. It is possible that, like Fossil Fools, it will even stand the test of time. But if annihilation is around the corner, as this film persuasively imagines, you might not want to spend your precious remaining hours watching Tom Cruise use his pinky nail to feed tuna to an animatronic cat.
Where Digger has its ice shelf, the 2010 film The Social Network had a person, and that person was Mark Zuckerberg. When the Winklevoss twins visit Harvard president Larry Summers to explain that Zuckerberg has stolen their idea for a social networking platform, Summers is dismissive and snide. When they suggest this idea could be worth millions, he replies, “You might be letting your imagination run away with you.”
No one sees Zuckerberg coming, because no one has the imagination or the hunger of this prickly dweeb from Westchester County, and Sorkin cannot help but throw some begrudging admiration his way. “You’re not an asshole, Mark,” says one of Zuckerberg’s young attorneys. “You’re just trying so hard to be.”
Eisenberg’s squinting, surly adolescent has aged into a bopping, smirking twerp who cannot find a necktie to suit his sallow complexion. (His poor, poor professional dresser.) In The Social Reckoning, Strong, an unrepentant Method performer, captures Zuckerberg’s smugness and impatience, though the film is not interested in some of his specific quirks (the aborted political run, the mixed martial arts hobby). Throughout the film we see him prepare to testify before Congress, with the help of a professional crisis manager (Wunmi Mosaku) and associate turned public detractor, Charlie (Bill Burr), who has been improbably called on to serve as a resource. Charlie and Mark argue at length about whether it is Facebook’s job to police deliberate misinformation. “Harm, I promise you, is fucking imminent,” Charlie warns.
With all its focus on preparation, The Social Reckoning, like Digger, is consumed with the act of rehearsal. The fact that the characters are simply honing their performances infuses their words and actions with an air of unreality: Whether they’re discussing climate apocalypse or right-wing indoctrination, there’s a sense that this is all practice and that the real dangers are happening somewhere off-screen. Characters hide behind their scripts: Zuckerberg flatly repeats that Facebook is the public square, Facebook is a corkboard, even as he skews the Facebook algorithm toward “meaningful social interaction,” an internal euphemism for “outrage bait.” Users, fed toxic slop, rehearse increasingly extremist political or self-harming beliefs until, finally, they are radicalized or broken.
No longer the surly, squinting teen to whom we had private access, Zuckerberg has grown into an impenetrable billionaire and a public figure, so he is no longer required to make sense. And, like Digger and the powerful men who surround him, Zuckerberg’s sense of scale is warped by greed and the dick-measuring contests of Silicon Valley. When he is presented with the option to put in safeguards to avoid inflammatory, dangerous speech, the only downside being a 1 percent reduction in users, he snaps, “Do you know what one percent is at scale?”
Zuckerberg has ceased to be the smartest guy in the room, and so Sorkin redirects his attention to journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) and Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). Political reporter Horwitz moves to The Wall Street Journal’s Bay Area office to cover the Facebook beat, despite his knowing nothing about social media or technology. (His boss, played by Betty Gilpin, is a foul-mouthed, His Girl Friday–style delight.) Coming home from a bad date with a Facebook bro, Frances sees Jeff’s message on her LinkedIn and impulsively responds.
She has become concerned about the dangers that Facebook poses to teen mental health, and about the ways the algorithm had been redesigned to direct users toward extremist hate groups. For a long time, she has been trying to convey her troubling findings to other members of the Civic Integrity committee; all she has received in return is the nickname “Cassandra,” a reference to the woman in Greek mythology cursed with visions of the future and never be believed when she shares them.
Haugen and Horwitz have their own mantras to rehearse, drums to beat; Haugen in particular. “You and I aren’t on the same team,” Haugen recites, ad nauseam; she believes in the “mission” of Facebook. Haugen is a squarely adorable Sorkinian invention, a blunt and scowling heroine game to do Anora cosplay when she wants to go incognito in public. (On one trip to his hotel, she dresses up in a black bustier.) Meanwhile, Horwitz asks his source the right questions and waits patiently, blue eyes wide and warm, as she ties herself in knots. She mocks his love of old movies and calls his banana daiquiris “a dumb drink”; he teases her, approvingly, for being “mean. Like, scary mean.” It plays more like a 1990s romantic comedy than a corporate thriller.
This fictionalized near-miss love story is there because the audience needs something to look at during the film’s lengthy scenes of exposition. When the two aren’t flirting, they are explaining journalistic ethics and Tech 101 to one another, and, more importantly, to us. The bulk of the film’s run time is dedicated to these conversations, sometimes enlightening but mostly rudimentary rundowns of how social media works. These only underscore who this film is for: social media luddites, middlebrow legacy media fanatics, and Facebook obsessives who, in Horwitz’s words, don’t even realize the drink has been spiked.
The Social Reckoning lacks the cinematic dynamism of The Social Network or even of Digger, which, for all its shortcomings, is wildly visually inventive. Digger is ostensibly about a play but works like a movie, while The Social Reckoning is a journalism movie that feels like a play, and a didactic one at that. The most compelling sequence comes when the action cuts between two threads: Haugen, having quit her job, snaps pictures of sensitive internal documents before she loses access to the Facebook server; Zuckerberg is panic-stricken on January 6 as Trump supporters storm the Capitol, and staffers in his war room beg him to lock Trump out of his account.
Are these moments meant to be happening at the same time? Or is it more of a thematic montage, placing the patriotism of a whistleblower next to the horrors of bloodied flags and Zuckerberg’s infuriating facial expressions? I’m not sure precisely what Sorkin means here, but at least the movie is showing us something instead of just telling.
The Social Reckoning ends on a muddled hopefulness, with Haugen testifying before Congress—unlike Zuckerberg, she is seemingly unrehearsed, frank, drawing on just a few cute notecards. The closing title cards detail Facebook/Meta’s recent $17 billion settlement with 47 states, alongside the company’s renewed commitment to zero fact checking. It also refers to the enormous influence Facebook once exercised over the circulation and consumption of news, citing a 2018 Pew Research Center study finding that 43 percent of adults read about current events on the site. The music is triumphant, as is Haugen’s proud, abashed expression. The good guys’ victory is far from secured, but, as Horwitz says earlier of a basketball game on television, “the game’s not over.”
We must continue to mistrust and talk over those who would tell us, in Digger’s parlance, that “compliance is freedom.” Better, as the 2023 nuclear dramedy Asteroid City urged, to “keep telling the story.” For Iñárritu, storytelling is a vehicle for catharsis and distraction and not much else. The Social Reckoning, with all its cuteness and misplaced pomp, isn’t ready to roll over and play dead. It may be too late to reverse years of tech-induced harms, but there is still time to unfriend a few billionaires.
