A remarkably well made movie

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2015)

Everything in this movie is well done - appropriate for a bio of a man who couldn't settle for less than perfection. The acting is all good, but Michael Fassbender's performance as Steve Jobs is certainly deserving of, at the least, an Oscar nomination. The man knows how to act with his face and his body.
If he gets that nomination/win, however, I hope he will go on forever thanking the cinematographer, Alwin Küchler. Especially in the last part of the movie, the way his face is lit against often light-blue backgrounds gives it an astounding, almost surreal quality. You see every bit of stubble on his chin, every pore on his face. But that face seems to glow, not like a 1930s diva, but like something that is not quite human. It is a fascinating light, but not a warm one.
Also deserving of at least an Oscar nomination is the director, Danny Boyle. Boyle wrote the book on pacing. This movie never flags. There are times when he flashes back and forth, very quickly, between present and past. Sometimes I caught what was going on, a few times I did not. My fault, not Boyle's.
The script, by Aaran Sorkin, certainly never plays down to the audience. You can see that he is the man who created those scenes in "The West Wing" where fast-paced dialogue is delivered by actors walking briskly down a hallway. He lets no grass grow under his actors' feet. My only problem with the script was the very end, which I felt bordered on the saccharine, after having been anything but that before.
This movie has no "heart." With the possible exception of those last few minutes, it will never give you the warm fuzzies. There is no one to like here, and really no one to sympathize with. But the goal of this movie is not to make you empathize with the characters, just as the last-minute explanation of Rosebud never makes you sympathize with Citizen Kane. It is to make you see and, perhaps, understand a very complex and driven man who played a significant role in the development of late twentieth-century technology. No, he did not create a tectonic shift in the universe, as he evidently believed, and no, the launching of his products were not the biggest thing in the century after D-Day. I was left, at the end, thinking that it was a good thing he was in technology, which was so divorced from anything human, since the human was definitely not his domain.