A good movie about a bad person

Rating: 9/10 (24 February 2016)

It's quite difficult to expect to be amazed by a movie about a person you don't really like, who founded a company you're not a fan of, which produces gadgets you've never bought and will never buy. Especially since there was a movie about the same guy and the same company just a year ago. Which had a guy who looked so much more like the real-life Steve Jobs but still didn't pull it off for me.
Well, sometimes the expectations are to be exceeded. And what 'Jobs' failed to achieve, 'Steve Jobs' - by some uncanny magic or a dirty marketing trick - kinda managed to accomplish. It managed to show us the history of Apple and the key people behind it as a story of real people, not just look-alike moving and talking puppets. It managed to create drama which you don't just observe but instead feel to the marrow of your bones. And - despite being a movie about one big egotistical megalomaniac piece of sh!t of a person - it turned out to be a movie which you actually wanna like and end up doing so.
Michael Fassbender did one amazing and pretty impressive thing playing Steve Jobs for this flick. He actually proved that you don't have to look like a historical person to succeed at conveying him or her. Quite the contrary, it's the fact that they didn't even try to mess up with Fassbender's appearance to make him look more like Jobs that sold me on this one. Because it basically shows that you may look like anyone or anything, even like a giant talking papier-mache head, but if you truly live into your character then the audience would also believe it and after some time it would not even matter how you look. Although, and i have to admit this, by the time the movie reaches its apogee, Fassbender starts kinda resembling (in the physical sense) the person he was called in to portray. Not that it's a bad thing in the first place.
Another thing 'Steve Jobs' did right is by almost completely avoiding the bureaucracy of the business making. All these board meetings, corporate intrigues, "which department gets more financing" kind of stuff - all scratched out to make more room for what really makes this film stand out: the human side of every business. We finally get to see that it's not just Jobs who has any substantial personality, that both Wozniak and Sculley were deep and consistent and actually sympathetic people, and that even some engineer guys may have enough soul and guts to be given the screen time. Which only proves one big message most Apple fanboys don't wanna see: Apple is not just success, and Apple's success is not just Steve Jobs.
The two hours of this film didn't tell me much new about Apple or its products, and they certainly didn't depict Jobs as a person less unpleasant as i've come to imagine him to be. Still, those two hours were not wasted in vain, because no matter if you love Apple or his infamous co-founder or not, it's a company that did a lot to make the world of today what it is, and the people behind it deserve the tribute this film paid to them, even if some self-endorsing glorification couldn't have been avoided. At least it did mention some right things, showed some right choices being made and some true effort to be acknowledged. And if you need some photo flashes and an upbeat Google Zeitgeist-like hipster music to keep you on the edge of your seat and fully immersed - then why the hell not?