As a long-time Apple nerd, I was more than a little nervous when I heard about the Jobs movie for the first time.
It wasn’t just that I was afraid it’d be some sort of Kelso Builds Computers, either. While everyone knows who Steve Jobs was, the true nerd heroes — guys like Woz, Jef Raskin, Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld — aren’t household names. Having the Apple story told in movie theaters across the globe is a rare chance that people like me have to see our interests be placed on a huge platform.
Jobs starts with Steve Jobs introducing the iPod to Apple employees in 2001. The talk he gives is similar to the one he gave the press at the company’s on-campus event for the product.
The timeline of the movie is relatively straight-forward after the iPod flash-forward. We see Steve and company move from college and a trip to India to building the Apple I in the garage. We see the company explode with the success of the Apple II after Mike Markkula’s investment.
Jobs spends a lot of time on the Lisa — more than I had anticipated. We see Steve fire a top engineer for mouthing off about how typefaces are unimportant, then go on and on about how the Lisa’s discrete keyboard would change the industry forever. All the while, we see the board’s growing frustration. While they allow Jobs to take over the Macintosh project, that too falls flat, and Jobs is ousted.
All of that takes what feels like hours and hours. The NeXT hours and Apple’s troubled years are blown through as a montage with headlines being read. We suddenly see Steve in his garden and taking a walk with then-CEO Gil Amelio.
In this time frame, we see Steve at home. His wife Laurene Powell and son Reed make a brief appearance, as does his daughter Lisa.
Lisa’s story is well-known to Apple history nerds, but isn’t as heavy-handed as I feared it would be. We see Steve kick a pregnant Chris-Ann Brennan out his house and discuss it with his lawyer, but that’s about it.
By this time, Apple and NeXT are already in talks, and we see Jobs return to Apple’s campus — complete with gratuitous helicopter shots of 1 Infinite Loop.
There, Jobs meets Jonathan Ive, whom he tells to “take the day off and invent something you want to exist” after Ive shares with Steve his passion for what the latter “stood for” when he was the company.
The movie closes with Ive and Jobs discussing the original iMac, Steve becoming CEO of Apple, and firing most of the board. “Put the speakers inside!” Jobs tells the young designer when discussing the iMac. When told the board won’t go for it, Jobs replies that they won’t be asking permission. It’s all rushed, which is disappointing.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the story has been told publicly.
Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs aside, Pirates of Silicon Valley is probably the most famous rendition.
I think a lot of nerds love Pirates of Silicon Valley for it’s rather accurate telling of not only the Apple story, but Microsoft’s as well. In comparison, Jobs is very one-sided. In fact, the only mention of the Apple/Microsoft lawsuit is in a scene where Kutcher yells into a phone then slams it down, shattering the handset.
Produced as a made-for-TV-movie for TNT in 1999, it featured Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs. I’m not sure why people who make these films insist on picking actors who look like Steve Jobs, but it’s weird. Jobs hits viewers over the head with it, showing photos of major cast members and their real-life counterparts, side by side, before the credits.
We don’t ever see Ashton Kutcher as the 2001-era Jobs. It’s hard to buy him as a early–40s Steve during the portion of the film that takes place in the late 90s.
However, the majority of the film takes place from the late 1970s to the mid 80s, when Steve was younger than Kutcher is now. And, my goodness, do they look alike.
The similarities push further than just looks, however. Kutcher has reported that he spent a lot of time studying Steve’s mannerisms. For the most part, it paid off in the film. Kutcher nailed Steve’s way of walking and staring through people.
(In preparation for the film, Kutcher was admitted to the hospital after eating only fruit for several weeks. The scary part? Kutcher said his “pancreas levels were completely out of whack” after the experiment.)
Kutcher does a good job with the weird quirks and pauses Steve spoke with, but struggles with the emotional scenes. I found the similarities between he and Jobs interesting, but uncomfortable in some scenes.
By all accounts, Steve Jobs felt and showed a wide range of emotions, often in the same conversation. Kutcher just can’t pull that off. Every time he cries or yells in the movie, it feels … fake.
Jobs isn’t the only two dimensional character in the film. Woz has been all but stripped of his amazing sense of humor, and the only person to show any type of anger in the board room scenes is Jobs. When guys like Gil Amelio, Mike Markkula and even Daniel Kottke are snubbed or kicked out of Apple, their reactions are shallow and simple. Everything gets a nice bow put on it because no one ever makes a mess.
Almost as to cover for the emotional shallowness throughout the film, there’s sweeping music or acting-school-level pauses anytime something important happens. To make matters worse, instead of building a case through his actions, Steve just blurts out to Woz “I can’t work for other people.”
Major, famous sentences like Steve’s “selling sugar water” bit to John Sculley have so much attention drawn to them, it’s painful. There’s no finesse in this film whatsoever.
When Woz tells Steve he’s leaving Apple — an interaction that never actually happened — The Bearded One throws his oldest friend under the bus. Again, instead of exploring how “small and lonely” Steve’s world must be, Woz just says it. Everyone wears their emotions on their sleeves because they aren’t capable of taking things any deeper.
The biggest side effect to all of this is that Jobs just isn’t a good movie. Historically, it’s mostly accurate, which makes the nerd in me happy, but it’s a lackluster film. It’s as if an amateur theatre club acted out several sections of Steve Jobs’ Wikipedia page.
The whole thing feels more made-for-TV than Pirates, I don’t think Jobs will age as well. Would Jobs have been stronger without Kutcher? Perhaps. The failures of the film don’t all belong at his feet, however. I’m positive Aaron Sorkin can do better than Joshua Stern did with this thing.