Jobs: The Movie

I had high hopes for this movie. I really did. And despite all the bad hype it was getting, I still wanted it to be good. I wanted some semblance of the Walter Isaacson’s biography that I read twice before seeing this movie and it had none of that.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t because the acting wasn’t stellar or that the actors was wrongly casted – in fact, the acting was pretty stellar, and the actors all looked like their counterparts but the script, character portrayals, and the format of the movie wasn’t my favorite.

Ashton Kutcher did a great job of embodying Jobs from the hunched over posture to the hand gestures while he talks. Kutcher is more of an extrovert so for him to play an introvert was certainly interesting.

My biggest complaint is with the format of the movie. I felt like the entire thing was a movie trailer for a longer, future Steve Jobs movie. It was overall disjointed, skipped over some pretty substantial parts of his life, and didn’t even cover up some of the most recent events up until his recent passing. While half of Jobs’ story is his building up one of the largest companies in the world, the other half is his arrival back at Apple and how he disrupted the industry AGAIN. Additionally, the movie touches and skips over his familial relations, particularly with Lisa and introduce Jobs’ wife randomly during the second half of the movie without any explanation.

If you’re not an avid Jobs fan or didn’t bother to read up on his biography ahead of time, I’m guessing this movie would have left you very confused. Even with all my reading, I was still confused at the timeline and the parts of his life they chose to showcase. I really wished they had done a better job of capturing Jobs’ life. The casting was spot on, but the story was not.

If I had my way, Steve Jobs’ life would be a mini series on TV and each week, they would cover another chronological portion of his life. Think like the BBC Sherlock series. Two hours just isn’t enough to Jobs’ justice! The audiobook of his biography is more than 24 hours long. Even taking out the author’s commentary and the parts about his adoption process and parents (both biological and adoptive), you’ve still got a pretty hefty amount of material to work with.

Well on the bright side, there’s another Steve Jobs movie coming out by Aaron Sorkin with Steve Wozniak as a consultant. Side note: Steve Wozniak’s character was horrible misrepresented in the movie. He’s more of an introvert and much more shy than portrayed. So I’m going to pin my hopes on that instead.