Director: Danny Boyle
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 2.5
Biopic of the creative and ruthless co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender), structured around three significant press conferences in his life - 1984's unveiling of the Macintosh, 1988's NeXT show and 1998's (junky) iMac release - and using those events to detail his complicated/rocky relationships with his bitter ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston), his personal assistant (Kate Winslet), his "Rain Man" Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan), the CEO that fired him (Jeff Daniels) ... and his daughter (who he denies is his). Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's setup is certainly 'different' - none of that birth-to-death trajectory - as the camera trails Jobs as he moves from room to room, always planning and thinking, while being interrupted by the other characters to bark at him while he talks around them: it's a heavy-handed and awkward storytelling technique. While it's nice that Sorkin and Boyle don't present their version of Jobs as an angel - and Fassbender is superb in the role, steely and manipulative - they're also suggesting that it's okay to be an asshole if you're a genius. Did Jobs ever really have a Dark Night of the Soul, a moment when he realized the way he treated others was simply unacceptable, or were such human matters irrelevant to him? (Fittingly, he wanted his Macintosh to seem 'human' even when he couldn't be.)
