Link: Jobs

Summary: The story of how Steve Jobs founded the computer company Apple.

Thoughts: This film suffered from two main problems.  Firstly, there was no over-arching theme, at least none that I could find, so it feels more like a dramatized documentary than a self-contained film.  Secondly, it seems Steve Jobs was too much of an arrogant jerk to be the inspiring figure he’s simultaneously attempted to be portrayed as.  His character in this film was almost completely unlikeable.  He treats his friends like dirt, and puts so much pressure on them to succeed it’s a miraculous wonder anyone continued to offer their services.  Meanwhile, what work did Jobs do?  In the film, mainly badger potential business partners, making it again seem miraculous his company was ever successful.  So when the sentimental music swells up in the background and Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs starts speaking in vague general abstractions about being nobly creative and changing the world, it feels like the forced empty sort of speech it is.  I have no idea how well the film reflects the true story of the man and the company, but as a film, this just doesn’t work.

About: Interestingly, part of the film was shot at Jobs’s actual childhood home in California, where his stepmother still lives.

Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak was approached by the filmmakers, but he turned down the opportunity to consult on the film after finding the script “was crap.”  Instead, he’s consulting on another Steve Jobs biopic, one being written by Aaron Sorkin, the writer behind The Social Network, based on Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography.  So we’ll probably get a much more decent Steve Jobs biopic sometime in the next few years.  It would be interesting, though I suppose quite unlikely, to have Ashton Kutcher reprise his role as Jobs; he does look like Steve Jobs, in a way.