Steve Jobs: Not A Biopic About Steve Jobs, But A Look At Why Steve Jobs Was Steve Jobs

Rating: 8/10 (4 November 2015)

Steve Jobs is one of the most interesting films of the year about one of the most innovative people of our time. This was made possible due to outstanding performances from a cast led by Michael Fassbender as Jobs, a very subtle and straightforward direction by Danny Boyle, and a classic Aaron Sorkin screenplay that doesn't explore exactly who Jobs was, but instead shows why Jobs was the person he was.
Danny Boyle, taking a more frank approach in his direction by allowing the acting and the writing to shine more, does a fantastic job directing this movie. But by far the best decision he made in terms of his direction was in the way it was filmed. For the 1984 segment, Boyle filmed it in 16mm film. Then in the 1988 segment, it was filmed in 35mm film. And finally for the 1998 segment, everything was filmed in digital. This brilliantly shows how Apple's technology evolved over the fourteen years depicted in Job's life.
This entire screenplay is classic Sorkin; its got the walk-and-talk dialogue, the two conversations going on simultaneously, it's all here. However, what Sorkin really got right in his writing was the emotional relationship between Jobs and his daughter. I really connected with the relationship Jobs had with her, and I thought that Sorkin didn't sugarcoat their relationship whatsoever. Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Michael Stuhlbarg all do fantastic work, and their relationships with Jobs were extremely well- developed as the film continued to tell its story.
This is the literal definition of a dialogue movie; the entire film consists of Jobs having conversations with people just before three big product reveal conferences over a fourteen year period, and we get to see how Jobs matured as a person from product launch to product launch to product launch. All of these conversations are riveting because Michael Fassbender is the embodiment of who Steve Jobs was. People who are familiar with Jobs work know that he wasn't exactly decent, sometimes tyrannical, but no one could deny his creative genius. Through Fassbender's incredible performance, we're able to better understand why Jobs was the way he was during his life. At one point in the film, Steve Wozniak, played by Seth Rogan in what may be the best performance of his career, says to Jobs, "You're not an engineer. What do you do?" Jobs responds to him by saying, "Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra." This illustrates that Jobs was an incredible innovator, sometimes too imaginative in his ideas for the technology that existed at the time. He couldn't always do things he wanted to do, but that's how innovators are, and that's how they should be.
Steve Jobs is not a biopic about Steve Jobs. Instead, Steve Jobs is a movie about why Jobs was the way he was, and it capture the person that Jobs was perfectly with the performances, the direction and the dialogue. If you love dialogue-driven movies, you can't find much better than Steve Jobs.