Steve Jobs Review

No Connection

Steve Jobs

Director: Danny Boyle

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg

Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011 and so because he was such a divisive but interesting character, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to tackle his life and career. Director Danny Boyle has a wonderful CV that includes Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later while screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was the man who wrote The West Wing and The Newsroom. Boyle even picked Michael Fassbender, arguably one of this generation’s most versatile and talented actors to play Apple’s late head. So why with all this talent behind this film is Steve Jobs such a stultifyingly dull and unengaging film? There is definitely a story here, or at least the real tale of Jobs, a man who many people despised but a man who created a unique niche for himself in the world of technology. He turned around a company that was in true dire straits financially and he brought, with the assistance of other people, life-changing technology into people’s homes. He was one of the most significant figures in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century history.

Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet)

Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) with Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen)

“Steve Jobs changed the world but this film is repetitive, uninteresting, hollow and empty.”

But Steve Jobs the film seems to have forgotten that biopics only work if there is some sort of emotional connection to the central character and the peripheral ones too. Sorkin’s script makes everybody sound like a mouthpiece for his expositional and desperately unnaturalistic dialogue and situations. Boyle can’t be let off the hook here either: his directing is dull, the pacing is repetitive and minutes feel like hours as you watch the film. It does look pretty but it feels like a two-hour trailer for a real film yet to be made. Fassbender as Jobs mouths Sorkin’s terrible scribblings but throughout the film, everything is so ham-fisted, cliched and hackeneyed that the audience feels no empathy or emotional connection with him, with the exception of a short scene right at the end between Jobs and his former boss John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), which offers a tiny glimpse of what might have been. Kate Winslet as Jobs’ put-upon assistant Joanna Hoffman is terrible, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘one-note.’ The film is scattered with a series of product launches in various opera houses around the world, which serve little purpose except to offer another opportunity for people to shout at each other in a very unconvincing fashion. Ironically, there is a scene where Jobs unveils his new computer, the NeXT, which was a cool-looking black box without an operating system and the filmmakers have unwittingly created the perfect analogy for what is desperately wrong with this film. Boyle and Sorkin were so in love with the idea of Steve Jobs that they forgot to invest it with any sort of substance at all. Steve Jobs changed the world but this film is repetitive, uninteresting, hollow and empty.

JOEL MEADOWS