Steve Jobs
starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogan and Jeff Daniels
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
directed by Danny Boyle
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
There have been a couple of movies recently about Steve Jobs (1955-2011). This one, Steve Jobs, is based on the book by the same name by Walter Isaacson. It is not about the founding of Apple and the invention of the revolutionary Apple II computer (invented by Steve Wozniac and marketed by Jobs), but about tracing Jobs’ career - successes and failures - up to the introduction of the wildly successful iMac computer in 1998. After a couple of failures in the technology business, the iMac saved Jobs’ reputation and fortune.
Jobs is eulogized as a genius, and I suppose he was. But he was also a stark raving asshole. This film dramatizes that, but we don’t need a film to teach us. His difficult personality was already legendary. Jobs was a salesman. He was not an engineer. He could not write code. He was a good talker, a manipulator, a salesman, and an esthetic visionary, but it fell to other people, like Wozniac, to do the technical work.