I should start by saying that this movie is okay. It's not great but it's not bad either. It got me to think about the world I live in and reflect a little on my life.
I'm 32 years old now and I've seen innovations in computers in my lifetime that boggle the mind. When I was a kid, the first computer I ever saw was in school and we were using those giant floppy disks. The ones that really were "floppy" and held about 1.2 megabytes on it. The computer was monochrome and really the only thing we did on it was learn to type and play Oregon Trail. I had better learning sessions playing educational games on the Atari 2600. Next thing I know, I'm in 4th grade and now were using the hard 'floppy' disks and they had even more memory on them. Those we actually used to write documents because we had a full 2 megabytes of space now! Nowadays were talking gigabytes and even terabytes of memory on computers. We walk around with portable computers every day of our lives.
The cellphone was a new invention in my lifetime. The first one I ever saw was bigger than my head and had exactly one function, making phone calls. Now we have smart phones that do everything except cook breakfast in the morning.
That is ultimately what this movie is about. The innovation of the last 30 years. And that's the biggest problem this movie has. The movie really can't decide if this is a biopic about Steve Jobs or a history of Apple Computers. It tries to do both and it becomes unsatisfactory either way. There are plenty of movies dealing with the Apple/Microsoft/IBM wars... this movie glances past it. It never really digged into the life of Steve Jobs enough to say it's a biopic. What did we learn about Steve Jobs after watching this movie? He's brilliant, driven, and a world class jackass. Throughout the movie we see him abandon his first-born child. His daughter Lisa. Then we fast forward to her as a teenager and they are all one big happy family? I felt like I fell asleep during the movie and missed about a half hour. But no the pacing really is that quick. And for a movie that is over 2 hours long, that tells me they had way too much material to be doing this kind of movie. Because there clearly was a lot cut out!
This really should've been more like The Social Network. That movie had a clever vehicle for telling the story. It is interspliced with the lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg. As the hearing goes on, we learn about the backstory of Facebook. As the characters hear the story, we the audience hear the story. Jobs never goes deep enough and focuses way too much on the Apple products being designed by Steve Jobs to ever tell us about the man. We never really get to know him. We don't understand how or why he's such a womanizer or his relationship with his parents, or why he doesn't believe his daughter really is his, or where all his trust issues come from. I never understood why he couldn't keep his damn shoes on! Quirky I guess but just something would've been nice.
If this was meant to be a history of Apple Computers, it never digs into the drama of the competition it had with IBM and Microsoft. Major events in the history of the company are glanced over. Once Jobs left Apple, the company took a nosedive and quickly. But we never see that. It just fast forwards through about 10 years of history so we can see Steve Jobs become CEO.
The lack of focus leads to bad pacing for the movie. It's guilty of just trying to do too much. It's worth seeing but probably only once.
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