The much anticipated Steve Jobs exists so much as a single entity that we may forget that the 2013 Ashton Kutcher Jobs movie ever existed. Steve Jobs has been a much bigger hit with critics (85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes versus 27% rotten) and audiences (the 2015 movie earned more than half of what the 2013  movie grossed in its first week alone). While neither Kutcher nor Michael Fassbender (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) looks anything like the actual former CEO of Apple, Fassbender is a much more credible dramatic actor than Kutcher ever will be. That is reason enough to give Steve Jobs the nod over Jobs if you debate which one to watch. This review will not compare the two movies as I have not seen Kutcher’s Jobs, and I have no desire to see it. For whatever reason, I wasn’t looking as forward to the Fassbender vehicle as I thought I would have been, and it turns out that trepidation was justified. Steve Jobs was a very average movie that I can only recommend with the caveat that, while you might like it, you aren’t going to like it as much as you were hoping to like it.

Steve Jobs was a two-hour history lesson (and that’s not necessarily a good thing). Sure it was good to see the history of Apple and the Macintosh and Jobs’s involvement with each. But this movie didn’t even have a pulse until the final 20 minutes when Jobs’s 19-year-old daughter Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine – Future Weather, A Summer In Genoa) showed up for the first time. Lisa was played in this movie by three different actresses (ages 5, 8, and 19), but the Harvard college student Haney-Jardine helped provide the movie’s most heartfelt moments. Though she only had, at most, 20 minutes of screen time, she stole the show. It is 1998 by this point, and Jobs is at a conference ready to unveil his new iMac. He and Lisa aren’t talking to each other at the moment after he has said he wouldn’t pay her tuition for the semester because he didn’t protest her mother’s selling of their home. This seems to be a prevailing theme in this movie. which I will discuss in the following paragraphs.

I do not like to curse in my blog, but if there was one thing that I really learned about Steve Jobs in this movie, he was an asshole. I had no idea. While he was a philanthropic CEO by doing such things as donating machines to schools on just about every level, he was, at least portrayed, a jerk in his personal life. Though he was worth billions, he made Lisa’s mother become a beggar. There were lots of scenes in this movie that seemed to repeat themselves. Constantly we found Jobs at some sort of launch conference, in the back, doing his best to prepare for a speech he waited until the last minute. At these conferences (1984’s Macintosh launch in 1984, Jobs’s NEXT cube in 1988, and the iMac in 1998), we find Jobs acting aloof and his head of marketing and number one confidante Joanna (Kate Winslet – The Reader, Revolutionary Road) trying to get him to focus on the matter at hand. However, there is always a side situation that Jobs has to deal with involving Lisa and her mother, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston – Sleeping With Other People, The Factory). As mentioned earlier, Chrisann has almost no source of income (Jobs denied being Lisa’s father for many years) and is forced to beg for money from Steve. He ends up always giving her money, but not before he lectures her and what some might consider being a form of brain manipulation. 

Jobs was a visionary who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was never one to start a meeting late, and he wasn’t one for excuses. Was he an ethical man? Will this movie shows that he was willing to bend the rules a little bit if it helped his company achieve. He also wasn’t one to dole out undeserved (or even deserved) compliments. Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, Take This Waltz) plays Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple II computer and the perfect antithesis to Jobs. Rogen continued to dismiss the idea that he’s a one-trick pony and can only be limited to raunchy rom-com’s. As he half-heartedly joked in a recent interview when he pleaded to directors that he “won’t ruin their dramas,” he’s done nothing to suggest otherwise. Just because he is a super talented comedian doesn’t mean he can’t pull off dramas. He’s following the mold set by Jonah Hill, who has earned multiple Best Supporting Actor nominations for the biopics Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street. In any case, Wozniak is constantly trying to get Steve to do the right thing (much like Joanna). But Jobs was never really a man who listened to the voice of one person. For better or for worse, he listened to the masses. When Wozniak encourages over and over for Steve to recognize the Apple II team for all of their hard work because it’s the right thing to do, he steadfastly refuses. He’s an arrogant man who sees things as black or white (or better as binary…either one or off). There was very little grey in Jobs’s life.

Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) is a masterful director. In each of the two mentioned movies, he did an incredible job of interweaving scenes from the protagonist’s past into the present storyline. This resulted in an enhanced movie experience for each film. Boyle received multiple Academy Award nominations for each of these films and took home the best hardware in the business (Best Director, Best Picture) for Slumdog Millionaire. Unfortunately, the same approach with Steve Jobs didn’t work. Honestly, there was too much material to present. For example, there are multiple scenes where there is a current conversation going on between Jobs and one of the supporting actors (for example, John Sculley [Jeff Daniels – The Lookout, The Squid and the Whale], CEO of Apple from 1983-1993) while going back and forth with a flashback between these two characters. In my opinion, it was uneven and even a little sloppy. Steve Jobs was a much more complex movie to adapt a screenplay for as well as edit. While Boyle didn’t fail, he didn’t knock his flashback scenes out of the park as he did with both Slumdog Millionaire (my #2 movie of 2008) and 127 Hours (my #6 movie of 2010 – the best year for film in any year of my life). Likewise, Boyle does a great job of incorporating the score into his movies, and while the background music did enhance the scenes of Steve Jobs, again, there was just no comparison when you lined up the score against the other two movies. (In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m strongly recommending Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours over Steve Jobs.

In many ways, Steve Jobs felt like a two-hour documentary you might find on The History Channel. I never felt like there was a team where I was rooting for him. Each time I wanted to like him, he gave me a reason to like him even less. While the acting was good and, at times, very good, this was a drama without much drama. In many ways, it earned a much higher score than it otherwise would have because of the last 20 minutes. Haney-Jardine’s Lisa was the only person who could humanize Jobs and put him in his place. And we might not have even gotten that if she wasn’t so convincing as his often dismissed daughter, who never could seem to do anything right (or at least could never really do anything right and get recognition from her father for it). But in a way, it was too little too late. I appreciated the scene, but Jobs still held back, and the reconciliation was replaced with reaching a middle ground. But of all of the people in his life, his daughter was the only one who made an impression on him. This part of the movie was important, and I wish I could score the final 20 minutes an A, but I could only give it a B+ at best because there was still too much that was held back (and I think that had less to do with Fassbender or Boyle and more just because that was who Jobs was).

In terms of an entertaining biopic, there are hundreds out there that feel less like a documentary. With that said, if the life of Steve Jobs is of interest to you or if you are a fan of Apple, I think this movie could be worth a watch. It does not need to be seen on the big screen and, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, even if you do see it and you do like it, I don’t think you’ll like it as much as you were hoping to.

Plot 9/10
Character Development 7/10 (Outside of Haney-Jardine, there was very little growth of the characters, and the change that we were supposed to feel felt forced…I would have expected more growth in 15 years)
Character Chemistry 7.5/10 (Fassbender and Rogen were great together…the same couldn’t be said about the time Fassbender and Winslet were together)
Acting 8/10 (as mentioned, there were some solid performances from Fassbender, Rogen, Winslet, and Daniels)
Screenplay 7/10
Directing  7/10 (very uneven, which is ironic because I thought two of Boyle’s most recent films (Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours) were two of the best-directed movies of this century)
Cinematography 9/10 (Most of the movie takes place in the 1980s, and the scenes indeed represent that. The last third took place in 1998, and the only aspects that changed to me were Fassbender’s clothes and Winslet’s hairstyle)
Sound 8.5/10 (background music throughout just above every major scene…it added to the movie rather than detracted from it. I could only imagine how some of these scenes might have played out without the music)
Hook and Reel 7/10 (for perhaps the most innovative company of the last quarter-century, you would have thought this movie could have been more entertaining)
Universal Relevance 10/10
80%  

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• The Social Network
• The Founder
• Joy
• Slumdog Millionaire
• Pirates of Silicon Valley