He’s an icon up there with Einstein, Dylan, John Lennon … and Apple can also rest assured that every one of Jobs’s social crimes and misdemeanors ultimately takes a backseat to his fatherhood. If Jobs is emotionally stunted, he still has kingly stature. Like Sorkin, Boyle prizes energy above all, and Steve Jobs isn’t the hatchet job that the folks at Apple have long feared (and even denounced in advance of the opening). He’s the deftest superficial director alive.
Boyle doesn’t bring his own point of view - the way David Fincher chilled down and distanced Sorkin’s script for The Social Network - but you can’t fault his palette. The camera trails the characters in the manner of Birdman, and director Danny Boyle keeps the traffic flowing expertly. Little of this happened in the exact way it does onscreen, but it’s generally accurate and performed at such a rollicking tempo that as you watch you hardly care.
I muttered - along, I suspect, with everyone else in the theater - “What a dick.” He even tells her the “Lisa” computer that was named after her wasn’t named after her at all. He so hates being tied down that he crushes the enchanting 5-year-old’s spirit. Jobs has denied paternity despite strong DNA evidence and - even though he’s worth hundreds of millions - won’t support them financially. The movie’s major thread is Jobs’s relationship - or lack of one - with his daughter, Lisa, who’s toted into the convention hall by his ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston).
Steve jobs 2015 first old mac#
On the outside the Mac might smile and say hello, but inside it’s, hands-off. More important is Wozniak’s indignation at the Mac’s closed operating system, which he regards as selfish, even antidemocratic. Neither do the pleas by famed Apple pioneer Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), who argues unsuccessfully with Jobs to recognize publicly the team that built the Mac’s predecessor, the Apple II. His paternalistic reassurances that Jobs has worth don’t register. Even more fervent is Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), a father figure who thinks the secret to Jobs’s conscienceless ambition is his inability to make peace with having been adopted. Mac team member Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) - whom Sorkin depicts as a kind of executive assistant - tries to temper Jobs’s fury, but no one can impede his drive for absolute control.
Steve jobs 2015 first old movie#
The question the movie raises is if Jobs has a human face. It’s the key to differentiating his computer from the soulless-looking machines of IBM and other competitors, portrayed in a new, controversial, 1984-inspired commercial in which look-alike Orwellian slaves are liberated by the arrival of artists, dancers, and other wayward individualists.
Steve jobs 2015 first old software#
Mac software designer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) can’t guarantee the first part of the Mac demo - a smiley face that says “hello” - won’t crash the computer, which prompts Jobs to bully, threaten, and promise to kill him. The first act - which leads to the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer - has all the seeds of the movie’s undoing, but it’s still amazing to watch: so many balls in the air. Steve Jobs could be a study in what’s wrong with a mainstream cinema that venerates celebrity above all and locates the tragedy of American life in the absence of good dads. Shame about that third act, though, and the ending that retroactively diminishes everything that preceded it. The first act is a thing of beauty and the second, good enough. It’s Aaron Sorkin’s way of turning Steve Jobs into a theatrical tour de force, compressing the exposition in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography to the point that it boils - and nearly boils over. The structure is ingenious: three plainly demarcated, 45-minute acts set in 1984, 1988, and 1998, each building to a momentous product launch and a seminal moment in the life of Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender). Photo: Francois Duhamel/Universal Pictures