A rich biography turned into a shallow bickering

Rating: 2/10 (20 January 2016)

When one deals with a life of a personality such as Steve Jobs, that writer would have to try really hard to make the biography/biopic boring. Regardless where you stand on issues such as Steve Jobs "creativity" or his family matters, or his personality, we can all agree that there must be plenty of material in his life that would make for an interesting biopic. And of all the interesting stuff that did happen in his life, mostly behind closed doors, we get to listen to non-stop verbal diarrhea of monologues, which should pass for dialogues... but which are all too predictable and formulaic to be of any interest: every sentence is interrupted, questions are either ignored or answered with a sarcastic put-down and hardly anyone is listening to anyone. There is nothing to reveal anyone's motivation, no depth to any of the characters and whatever you see in the first few minutes gets repeated all the way to the end: maybe Jobs is a genius, maybe he is not, but lets see how he argues that point on and on; maybe he loves his daughter, maybe he does not; maybe he was responsible for those great products, maybe he was not... and so on. The whole movie is set in those few minutes before each famous Apple (and Next) product launch: first we see the 1984 product launch, then the next one, then the next one, and by the end, even Jobs himself says "how come everyone is coming to talk to me just minutes before a product launch?" Well, its because the script is simply awful. It was obviously written in a rush and the result is uninspired, shallow and pretentious film. Direction was no better and end result is something akin to the first Apple computer: useless (yes, the very first apple computer did not have any output, so it was actually useless).