The journey to getting this Steve Jobs film made was a long and arduous one. With directors, actors, composers and even studios being swapped out the build up all seemed to be a rush to get the thing to print and release. While behind the scenes info tells us the director and actors had more than normal time to rehearse their scenes before a single camera rolled I couldn’t help but feel the whole idea of the film was ultimately rushed.
The rehearsal I mention is certainly evident in everyone’s performance. Even Fassbender, who I do like, but have never been truly convinced in any role before this. Is he a good Steve Jobs? No, but he’s fine at it. Though I couldn’t help but imagine what the once promised Christian Bale would have been like. Seth Rogan tries his upmost as Steve Woz and delivers his parts well but he is the most unconvincing in the film. And that’s the start of the problems here.
Everyone is acting their roles well but never convinced me they were the people they portray. I think part of the problem here was I’ve watched a lot of interviews and keynotes of these people and knowing this little bit of extra information was distracting. Especially when you’re not completely convinced the words these actors are saying were actually said by the people they portray.
Comparisons to The Social Network are inevitable but when you have the same screen writer for both then you can’t blame it. This is a Sorkin script and as usual he goes full throttle. We are left breathless watching and listening to the quick fire back and forths, the signature walking and talking and the long exposition speeches and I will always love this. But where Sorkin succeeds as usual here, it’s his choice to write a film of 3 acts covering the Machintosh, NEXT and iMac launches (the first two being terrible failures in the history of Steve Jobs) that confuses me.
Having these acts play out almost exclusively behind the scenes of the upcoming keynote is an interesting and even entertaining watch but as I watched I kept thinking if this was the best story on Steve Jobs and Apple that could be told.
In The Social Network we are treated to an almost adventure style tale of starting something revolutionary from small beginnings, the highs and lows, the moments of genius and fate all flowing via two simultaneous court case narrations.
The story of Steve Jobs and Apple could have had the same adventure and what we got felt like snippets and frankly at times the worst parts of the story. Opening with the first great failure of Apple is a fine movie making move but only if we get to see the great turn around and success the company and Jobs got round to making. In fact that would have been educational for today’s iPhone generation who only know Apple as the behemoth of tech.
Then there’s the constant banging on the head we get of “Steve Jobs is a mean asshole” that never stops during the runtime. For anyone who didn’t know Jobs was mostly a cold calculating businessman they got the idea after the first act. We didn’t need two more acts of this because there was more to Jobs than the meanness. He wasn’t a genius engineer or programmer but he did “play the orchestra” as the film says. He was borderline ruthless in his vision of the future of tech and while the film hints on this it never gives us the great stories we’ve heard over the years. He knew how to get the best out of people for example when first meeting Jonny Ive and asking him to work on something great, anything as long as it’s great. Ive went on to design the iPod, iMac, iPhone and iPad. This is a story I would have liked to see on screen.
That’s what this film comes down to in the end. It tells a fine story but never quite the great story it could have. I still love Sorkin’s script and Danny Boyle directs the fast paced exchanges well albeit a little restrained than what we usually get from him. We get some insights into the history and mind of Steve Jobs but the film is too involved with making him into an almost villain with a tiny moment of ending redemption that we are robbed of something that could have been “insanely great” to quote the man himself.
