Without Trent Reznor, this film is a 0
Prepare for West Wing levels of reality distortion and Newsroom levels of smugness as Hollywood takes on the only thing it hates more than Trump: tech.
The heroic whistleblower, a disgruntled Facebook middle manager who was 37 when the events happened, is played by Mikey Madison, a gorgeous 27-year-old Academy Award winner.
The evil industrialist, a tech founder who was also 37 at the time, is played by Jeremy Strong, 47, best known for playing the high-strung, hyper-serious, morally burdened striver.
The casting itself is the thesis: it manufactures a generational conflict that didn't exist. The leaker is made luminous and young; the founder is made older, grotesque, and spiritually exhausted. In reality, they were the same age. One was a middle manager at Facebook. The other built Facebook.
And critics will praise this as “complexity.”
Even if this depiction had any relationship to the reality of the 2021–2022 post-Covid, Big Tech scandal era, the world has moved on. Facebook didn’t collapse. The “social media is destroying democracy” machine has been reprogrammed into “AI is destroying democracy,” and the same slopulists who spent years moralizing about Facebook have simply found a new technology to fear.
This is what frustrates me about Sorkin’s writing. It’s not that founders should be above criticism. It’s that building is always treated as pathology, ambition as corruption, and scale as guilt.
We should be excited about technology and working tirelessly to build a better future. Instead, we keep feeding the rage machine with prestige-drama rocket fuel: slandering the people who build things and lionizing the people whose main contribution is trying to stop them.
And as if that weren’t enough, they didn’t even bring back Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. At least let the rage machine have a good beat.