Well, if no one else is going to say it, I will.
I thought the title was better when it was written out as jOBS. It made me laugh and it was cute. Sure, some saw it as disrespectful, but I thought it was funny. Steve Jobs had a sense of humor after all, and this movie isn’t even a full biography.
Now we have the title as Jobs, (Trailer) which is a terrible name for a movie if you try to Google it without any extra words.
Sony is doing their own Steve Jobs movie that is being written by Aaron Sorkin, based on his biography from 2011. It will come out within the next two years, it will probably include his death and it will have a more serious tone.
“Draw me like one of your French Girls…”
The iPod. You probably have one. It helped change the music scene forever. Our story begins with a press conference of its release in 2001, then takes us back a few decades to get a more complete story.
It takes us back to Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) while he is already in college. I mean physically he is in a college, but he is a free spirit and not actively enrolled, despite being a pretty smart dude. After some design classes, we then see him working for Atari. He wants to be innovative, but everyone else just wants to keep the status quo. It turns out, he doesn’t work well with others, so he has to be put on his own projects.
But once his friend Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) shows him an invention he is working on, his life changes. Woz has made a machine that will display text that you type on a “keyboard” when hooked up to your television. Mind blowing, I know. That way you can see what you are working on, as you work on it.
With an eventual investment from Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney), they soon turn their garage corporation start up into a very successful corporation, leading the personal computer craze with the Apple II launch!
They even become a publicly traded company! This becomes bad news when they end up in development hell with the Lisa computer (and eventually the Mac) spending tons of resources and time on a machine that Steve will not release until it is 100% perfect. This leads the board of directors (J.K. Simmons) to get a new CEO for the company, John Sculley (Matthew Modine), the man who invented the Pepsi Challenge.
Jobs tells the story of a man who had a vision, and had a hard time getting that vision to the public. Steve Jobs would walk over anyone to achieve his dreams too, even his friends, because he really isn’t a nice person. The movie basically takes us up to the release of the Mac computer in the late 90s, in their attempt to make it sexy again. and briefly talks about the release of the iPod.
The Woz was later made even more famous thanks to the show Code Monkeys.
Basically, what I learned from this movie is that Steve Jobs could be a real jerk. He ignores his friends who helped get the company off of its feet. He threatens to sue his competition. He refuses to let people who work with him who tend to differ in opinion. He even refuses to believe his daughter is actually his.
He was not a swell guy.
What I dislike most about the movie is how disjointed it all feels. It is not a complete story by a long shot, only focusing on a few major events. By skipping around every few years, we are left to catch up every time the movie skips to another important event.
The ending included an inspirational radio quote by Steve, but it came about pretty suddenly. It was odd that they didn’t even talk about the idea for the iPod, and only mentioned it in the first scene. If they had it in complete chronological order, they could have at least ended it with the iPod scene, which would have provided some sense of closure. Partial biography or not, as a movie, it should have a coherent plot and an ending.
Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs did give him a chance to actually act for once and I’d say he did a great job. But the rest of the acting was just okay and overall this didn’t feel like it did a good job of telling me a lot about Steve’s life outside of a few specific events. It didn’t try to find out why he was a jerk to his friends, or where he got his inspiration from. I hope the next movie they make on his life is a bit better, and gives a more complete story.