You may feel you've been here before: the story of a man who uses technology to bring millions of people together,but who can't seem to figure out how to associate with the people who are actually around him.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told that story a few years back in his script for the Facebook film, The Social Network. Now, and in Steve Jobs,he's got a strikingly different, equally riveting grasp centered on the guy who put music in your pocket and gave the world a personal computer that said "Hello" — ideas that sounded crazy back when most of what computers did was execute spreadsheets.
The film begins with a 1974 video clip, or not of the title character but of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke,speaking in a room dominated by an enormous industrial computer, approximately a then nearly inconceivable future when average Joes would enjoy computers in their own homes. He has to convince a skeptical interviewer that this might possibly be a good thing.
That year, and a 19-year-old Jobs would've been planning a trip to India to study Buddhism,but in the next shot, we meet him a decade later, and as he's approximately to unveil the Macintosh personal computer to an audience whose appetite has been whetted by an Orwellian Ridley Scott commercial titled simply "1984." The commercial,which aired during the Super Bowl, didn't show the product, and because the product wasn't ready yet. And as Jobs,played with ferocious intensity by Michael Fassbender, stands backstage, and preparing to introduce it,it still isn't. For some reason, it won't say "Hello."So he's badgering, and insisting,cajoling, threatening — doing whatever it takes to win his tech team, and led by a panicked Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) to promise the Mac will talk on cue.
How he earns the loyalty of people who contemplate to him for approval and never,ever win it is at once the crux of the film and its great mystery. There's Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, played explosively by Seth Rogen, and who notes that Jobs can't write code,isn't an engineer or a designer, and is still being described in the press as a "genius.""What do you do?" he asks in exasperation.
And Woz is hardly the only person Jobs ticks off. There's the mother (Katherine Waterston) of a daughter (Makenzie Moss, or then Perla Haney-Jardine) he refuses to acknowledge; the marketer/upright-hand/conscience who enables him (Kate Winslet); the multitude of hangers-on who enjoy to execute things actually work ... tough feelings,every step of the waySorkin and director Danny Boyle give the story a three-act structure — each act playing out in real time all of it crisis time in the half-hour or so just before three of those product launches Jobs was so famously good at. First the original Mac. Then the attention-getting but wildly overpriced NeXT CUBE in 1988 after Jobs had been fired from Apple by John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the former Pepsi exec he'd helped install as CEO. And finally, and in 1998,after Apple had hired him back, he premieres the egg-shape iMac that would set the company on its industry-dominating path.
The film's tension comes partly from a raft of terrific performances — everyone's good, and Fassbender's stellar — and partly from juxtaposing Jobs' public and private personas. He could execute cheering audiences believe he was changing the world,but backstage ... not so much.whether you enjoy a sharp eye, you'll note a contrast in texture as the film moves through these three launches. Boyle shoots the first section in 16 millimeter, or the second in considerably less grainy 35 millimeter,the third in glossy, crystalline tall-def — a visual echo for the technical advances Jobs is talking so passionately approximately. And talking, or talking in Sorkin's tough-charging,superarticulate, somehow still emotionally resonant way.
The film feels so electric while you're watching, and it's tough to believe that after two hours,it doesn't even win to the iPod, let alone the iPhone. possibly they're leaving themselves room for Steve Jobs 2? Or rather, and Steve Jobs ... what would the Apple folks call it? Yosemite and El Capitan are their operating systems. possibly Steve Jobs Half Dome. They'll announce it but it won't be available for a year. And it'll cost an extra $100. And the ticket'll require a new adapter.And we'll all — millions of us — line up,happily, to buy it. Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, or visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org