How many Steve Jobs movies and documentaries are we going to get? Is it going to become like every other Apple product and we’ll be subjected to upgraded versions of Steve Jobs biopics that always look brighter and shinier than the previous biopics but also make the previous Steve Jobs biopics seem obsolete? Hopefully, they stop, and if they stop here then they’ll have stopped on a high.
Steve Jobs is the new biopic of the man behind the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and the loss of all your money from your wallet. Set behind the scenes of three of Jobs’ biggest unveilings; the film is split into three equal parts each set in real-time 40 minutes before each big presentation. During these 40 minute time periods, Steve Jobs deals with system malfunctions, board meeting debates, parenting issues, alimony deliberations and most importantly his massive fucking ego. With a solid recurring cast throughout each time period along with some kinetic editing and delivery of the shifts in time and space makes this one of the more interesting biopics of the last two decades.
It’s a given that this is an improvement to the Ashton Kutcher version. Essentially, if the Kutcher version was a first generation iPod Shuffle then this new version is the iPhone 6 of Steve Jobs biopics. Seeing as they’ve upgraded everything; they’ve upgraded Ashton Kutcher to Michael Fassbender, they’ve upgraded from Matt Whiteley (whose only ever writer credit is that Jobs piece of shit) to the new and improved Oscar-winning writer of The West Wing Aaron Sorkin, we’ve upgraded from the director of Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote to the Oscar winning director of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, and we’ve upgraded from low-rent Seth Rogen to... Seth Rogen.
So with all these upgraded elements, how good is it? The dialogue is punchy and tight, the performances are all rock solid and the narrative itself works so well in this three act structure. Essentially you have all of Steve Jobs biggest moments tied together by these three unveilings which are presented in compactly edited flashback, call backs to the previous conversations and character development through simple gestures. So yeah, it’s a pretty good film, if maybe just a little too clean and a little too tightly packaged.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Sorkin’s writing style, it’s such a unique voice in cinema and television nowadays that you could easily argue that he is an auteur in his own right ahead of the director, however with directors like Fincher and Boyle I realise that’s an incredibly hard argument to make. Getting back to Sorkin’s writing here though, it feels far too clean with respects to what is said in the film. It would be easy to say that this whole film has been written with the benefit of hindsight because everything that Steve Jobs says, even back in 1984, is indicative of how we live our lives today. Now Jobs is presented as arrogant, abrasive, dismissive of others, but throughout the whole film, he’s always right which just seems a little too convenient, plus some lines come off a little too perfect between all the arguments and back and forths.
Performance-wise everyone is performing at their best with Rogen putting in a very non-Rogen performance, Kate Winslet brings her usual talent but with a very hard to pin-point accent, but of course everyone is talking about Fassbender’s performance. His performance is good, he sounds like Jobs, as he ages he grows into Jobs, but in yet another year of white-washed Oscar nominations, its‘ Fassbender’s performance that feels like it could have made way for Samuel L Jackson in The Hateful Eight, or Michael B Jordan in Creed or especially Jason Mitchell’s role as Eazy-E.
When all is said and done, Steve Jobs is one of the more creative biopics and certainly worth watching if you are an Apple fan, however if you are not an Apple fan then this film will not win you over.
Steve Jobs gets Four out of Five Stars (or Four out of Five obsolete Ashton Kutcher iPod Shuffles)
No comments:
Post a Comment