Review of Steve Jobs (2015) by Dzimas — 06 Feb 2016

I guess it all comes down to how you want to remember Steve Jobs -- the guru who inspired a following of devoted Apple users or a self-absorbed entrepreneur who seized the moment, leaving behind him a trail of disgruntled co-founders, workers and former lovers. This movie takes the latter approach, but contrary to what some may think, Boyle and Sorkin make Jobs human, richly so in fact, and I think in time even those who have criticized this movie will come to regard it as the best testament of his legacy.

Whether or not Lisa was his daughter matters little. What matters is how Lisa becomes the muse around which Jobs built his ideas. From the start, the Apple was designed to be a user-friendly home computer that would become the "bicycle" for our ideas. A young Lisa immediately seizes its potential and in three highly-charged acts she also becomes Steve's sharpest critic. She represents the generation that has been brought up on the PC and is now shaping it into an image of themselves through the Internet.

Woz is Jobs' foil throughout the movie, determined to make Steve give the core Apple team its due, long after Jobs has dismissed this crew as B-players. This will no doubt rankle the Techies who probably don't see Jobs as anything more than over-hyped promoter. In fact, Woz accuses him of that in the movie, to which Jobs responds that he is the conductor and Woz is one of the musicians, first row of course.

The most interesting character is Joanna, a largely fictional construction who becomes Jobs "work wife" over the course of the film, reminding him of his moral responsibilities. This is probably what miffed Jobs' real wife, who is not even mentioned in this film. But, the filmmakers chose to take a theatrical approach, narrowing the essential characters down to a handful and building Jobs' life around them.

You can quibble with the authenticity of the film, but that's not what's at stake here. This is more about what made Steve Jobs tick. What drove him to be the leading innovator in the PC industry and how he reconciled this with those around him? I have to hand it to Boyle and Sorkin to turn this into a richly entertaining film that held this viewer spellbound throughout.