Z/Web

Being a huge fan and follower of Steve Jobs since the mid-80s, this is a difficult film for me judge objectively. I went in with the apprehension of a book-fan going to see the travesty of a movie made of a beloved novel, anticipating all sorts of factual and tonal errors and hating the performances of various actors, but I came away stunned at how much I enjoyed it. The question is: is it really that good or did I just like the subject matter?

Is it the best bio-movie ever made? Not by a long shot.

It’s clearly not a big-budget movie (though I was surprised at how many actors I recognized; there are few unknowns), and that shows in some awkwardness in pacing, acting, and directing. It feels more like an above average TV movie than a major motion picture. Everything is competent, but little is extraordinary. There’s not much imagination or vision.

For instance, the scene early on when Steve and his friends get high at Reed College is mostly shots of looking up at trees and the sky from ground view, and it’s very repetitive and goes on for much too long. (We get it. Steve did drugs, it inspired some of his thinking, move on.) This could have been handled in a much more interesting way.

Only occasionally is the writing striking, and that’s usually when they’re quoting the real Steve Jobs.

But all that doesn’t matter. What’s here is done well enough that I enjoyed it very much. Sure, there’s definitely stuff I would change and improve, but there’s a lot that’s very well-done. The casting is quite good. Ashton Kutcher gets the most controversy as the lead, but he was surprisingly good for most of the film. Only in a few places did he give off some sour notes (he especially overdid it in the anger scenes, where he went from zero to 60 in a split second and it wasn’t believable), and at other times he’s more of a caricature than a character, but most of the time he fades away and you just enjoy the movie. It is quite possible that in repeated viewings I’d find a lot more fault with his performance, but I’m not a Kutcher hater, so I found him to be okay in this.

The sets and period setting were also pretty good. I loved all the old Apple posters, old tech, and old cars. The only real oddity I noticed was Steve Jobs parking in a handicapped parking spot in 1980 — did they have those back then? It looked way too modern in design.

In terms of story, I wasn’t sure what this would cover — Steve’s initial Apple success or the triumph of his iPhone glory — but this focuses mostly on his early Apple days and getting kicked out of his own company. A fine choice, as the whole world knows about his eventual victory and this ends with him rebooting Apple and the future looking bright.

There’s lots of stuff left out — NeXT and Pixar, for instance — but there was a surprisingly amount of intricate detail included. I’m pretty familiar with the story and I don’t think I learned anything new, but fortunately nothing gravely inaccurate screamed out at me either, though I’m sure there are minor liberties.

Probably the weakest aspects of the movie are the pacing — it’s slow at times — and the whole board movement to fire Jobs was confusing and too abstract. It was hard to tell from this why Jobs was so bad for the company. The film needed more scenes of him doing crazy stuff. Also, the role of Arthur Rock as a clear villain was over-the-top, as though the writer thought he needed to tick the “antagonist” checkbox.

Along the same lines, while Steve was correctly portrayed as a visionary who could be a real jerk at times, there was little in the film that showed his actual genius. In particular, I wanted more of him forcing the best out of others, revealing his taste. There were scenes that set that up — such as the one to get an “impossible” design for a power supply in the Apple II built — but the film never followed up and showed us the success of that (it was just assumed, I guess).

In the end we have a decent film. It’s quite competent and not the disaster I feared. It may be a little dull for people who don’t know the story or who aren’t really interested in technology or history (or those who aren’t into boardroom fights), but I think it’s worth seeing if you’re an Apple fan or curious about Steve Jobs. I’m still more excited about the upcoming Aaron Sorkin version of the story (though wary of that as well), but this one is surprisingly entertaining. It’s also inspiring, as there are some great lectures by Jobs on the nature of being great, not letting anyone or anything stand in your way, and the importance of being honest to yourself. Jobs was a great man and this film gives us a glimpse of that.