Steve Jobs review: “If this movie were about someone else, he’d like it”

Left to right: Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld, Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs, and Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman in Steve Jobs. (credit: Universal)

In 2004, I acquired my first Mac. It was an iBook laptop, slightly boxy and all white. To say that I was excited to own an Apple product is an understatement. I spent most of my teenage years coveting friends’ colorful iMac G3s while I went home to a modest eMachines PC that froze and required restarts several times a day. Mac computers never seemed to crash as much as the PCs I grew up with; plus, they looked cool. The latter point is key to the company’s success. Apple has built a culture (some would shorten that to cult) around the aesthetic and hype of their products.

The iMac that I coveted so much in my teenage years was launched in 1998, a turning point at Apple following Steve Jobs’ return to the company that he co-founded. It is at this moment in Apple history that the new film Steve Jobs—based on the Walter Isaacson biography of the same name—closes on. The launch of the 1998 iMac is the last of three launch events the film is structured around; the others are the 1984 Mac and the 1988 NeXT cube. We never see the iPod, iPhone, or iPad (although there are hints of some of these products sprinkled in the film), but that’s fine. In this film, the products aren’t really the focus.

Steve Jobs is directed by Danny Boyle (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) and written by Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, The Social Network). That should tell you what kind of film this is. Expect a story where the main characters face some kind of obstacle and dialogue that's faster than your brain can process. Steve Jobs seems to start rather abruptly, with a group of people hunched over a computer trying to figure out how to make it say “hello”. Yep, this is the 1984 launch event, and we are immediately introduced to important players on the Mac team: Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender), Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet—who is brilliant in this role), and Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg). We also meet Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and other characters who were a part of shaping Apple in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

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