Jobs, now in theaters, tells the rise-fall-rise-again story of Steve Jobs, the man behind Apple Inc. When I took my seat in the theater, I soon realized Jobs was less about this innovator’s technological brilliance than it was about his bossy and single-minded personality.
Ashton Kutcher portrayed Jobs in the film that received an average rating of 4.9 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes. Kutcher is pretty easy on the eyes, even with the comb-over and sweater-vest look he dons in the movie.
Personally, I had trouble following the plot of Jobs; characters were brought onscreen without any formal introduction and events flew by without explicit explanation. All of the sudden, I found myself watching seven men sitting in a conference room firing Jobs from his own company!
Let me rewind for a minute. The company first started when Jobs’s friend, Steve “Woz” Wozniak, played by Josh Gad, was working on attaching a keyboard to a video monitor to display what he was working on while he worked on it. Jobs took the initiative of leading this “personal computer project” that started in his dad’s garage, which soon became a company called Apple Computers. To be honest, I was surprised and a bit disappointed to learn that Jobs was not the first one to cut the wires and glue the keys onto the board of Apple’s first computer.
The movie shows Jobs constantly working, but the fruits of his labor, like The Apple I, Apple II, and the Lisa computer (which we learn was named after the daughter he had with an ex-girlfriend), only make brief appearances. Even the first generation iPod is only shown in the first scene of the movie and never returns. In my opinion, there was not nearly enough coverage of how his products came into existence and their quick evolution into more recent years.
Jobs loved to escape his comfort zone and to push everyone else around him to do the same; he was personally driven to make something that people would appreciate, and he wanted those he worked with to feel the same way. He believed that corners should never be cut and thus was considered an absolute perfectionist. In a scene of the movie, Jobs even yells at and then fires his employee for not seeing the importance in multiple font options. The movie shines light on Jobs’s apparent motto: his way or the highway.
Jobs was depicted as heartless in the film, which made it hard for me to connect with the character or the storyline. His girlfriend was pregnant (with Lisa), and he had no regard for her. Woz, who was his second-hand man when starting up the company, quits, and Jobs’s character doesn’t even seem to feel badly. Jobs is told over and over in the movie that he is rude, selfish, and needs a reality check; however, this doesn’t phase him in the slightest. Apparently the reason for Jobs’s jerky behavior was his adoption as a child, but this part of his life is never thoroughly explained in the film.
Jobs, midway through the movie, is rejected from Apple because the way he operated put the board of the company at too much risk, but he is brought back to the company years later when Apple cannot function without his genius mind. “I think the way he sought love and affection [to make up for his birth parents’ rejection] was through the products that he built,” said Kutcher on The Colbert Report. “If [the consumers] loved the product, it meant that they loved him.” That said, I feel indifferent about the final execution of the movie: although a new perspective of Apple behind the scenes is demonstrated, the depiction feels incomplete. But in wake of the new iPhone boom, I’d say it’s a must-see.