"I'm Poorly Made"....What Can I Say I Hired the Wrong Guy

Rating: 4/10 (24 October 2015)

Because of the Sony hacks we know that David Fincher was slated to direct. He demanded a $10 million dollar payday and Christian Bale as Steve. I cannot for the life of me fathom why, after just crafting a masterwork like "Social Network" and Fincher's seminal filmography, Sony wouldn't pony up the cash to get this right. I like Danny Boyle, but he's not David Fincher.
You would never know after seeing this film that Steve had a wonderful marriage and clearly loved his children. Lisa moved in with Steve as a child and they reconciled. Steve built loyal relationships with people that wanted to work for him which was the only way they could have created planet shaking products like the iPhone. These folks could have gone anywhere - but they wanted to work for Steve - and under Steve they did the best work of their lives. He bought and built Pixar, the most successful movie studio of all time. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on Job's NeXT machine. He changed the music industry with iTunes. He brought tablet computing to the masses. He waged thermonuclear war against Bill Gates and Google....and won. Steve's 1975 vision of a computer on every desk became flesh. When Steve came back to Apple in 1997 it was 12 weeks away from bankruptcy. He turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet in the single greatest comeback story in American business history.
But you wouldn't know any of that after seeing this film. None of this was deemed important enough to be in the film.
Separated into 3, 45-minute Acts this version of the movie should have been a play. Each of the three scenes take place at 3 different product launches: Macintosh, Next and iMac. None of what you see on screen actually took place in real life. The characters chosen to be in the film were not present at these product launches. Lisa was not at a single product launch. Here, she appears in all three Acts. Sorkin makes a fatal mistake by making Lisa the centerpiece of each scene and, as he admitted in a interview, the 'hero' of the film. Act III takes place in 1998 for the iMac release and Steve is talking to Lisa about the iPod which wasn't released until 2001. They imply that NeXT was created to be acquired by Apple which is false. No signs of any of Steve's most important triumphs. No signs of any of the landmark products other than the Mac. Steve never spoke to Scully after he resigned from Apple, yet he appears at a NeXT product launch as CEO of Apple while Apple was suing NeXT. Joanna Hoffman was not a part of the Apple comeback in 1998. Woz was not at those product launches. Sorkin and Boyle get the NeXT, Lisa, Scully, Hoffman and Woz story dead wrong.
I don't recognize this person at all. I left the theater upset, bemused and saddened. The movie is a minefield of disappointment and frustrating inaccuracies.
Steve Jobs gets a 4 for squandering the opportunity to tell the definitive version of this dynamic life story.
Shame on them - not just for letting down his surviving family, close friends and Apple fans - but for the young boy or girl who goes into this film trying to learn about the innovator.