STEVE JOBS is a dramatic biopic looking at the life of Steve Jobs minutes leading up to three of his product launches: the Mac, the NEXT black cube computer, and the iMAC.   It takes plenty of dramatic license with the life of Steve Jobs with telling things about his life even though the events shown in them didn’t happen around the time shown in the film (except the problem getting the Mac to say Hello).   Michael Fassbender delivers another brilliant hypnotic performance as his Steve Jobs is an asshole perfectionist that people love to like or dislike depending on the person.   He has problems owning up to the fact he fathered a daughter (Lisa) with Chrisann Brennan while clashing with the engineers and programmers at Apple.   STEVE JOBS portrays three moments in 1984, 1988, and 1998 while having flashbacks to other moments in his life (like being fired from Apple and helping come up with the first Apple computer in a garage.  Kate Winslet is very unrecognizable as marketing executive Joanna Hoffman who stuck with Steve during the various moments in his work life.   Jeff Daniels is great as John Sculley, the first CEO of Apple, while Seth Rogan has the thankless role as Steve Wozniak who just seems to complain about the same things to Jobs as Steve Jobs refuses to acknowledge the Apple II team. 

 

Danny Boyle effortlessly directs an interesting dramatic portrait of tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender selling the hell out of his performance (he is so good he would probably give a great reading of the phone book and make it immensely watchable).  Aaron Sorkin’s script and dialogue crackles especially with Fasbender saying the words.  It is one of my favorite Danny Boyle films by far.

 

SPECIAL FEATURES:

INSIDE JOBS: THE MAKING OF STEVE JOBS- it is a three part making-of documentary with cast and crew interviews as they talk about the cast, characters, breaking to rehearse for one week between each of the third acts, using the real locations where these product launches happened, and the approach to using different formats for each act (16 mm for 1984, 35 mm for 1988, and the digital Alexa for 1998) and how Daniel Pemberton approached the score for each act.  

 

There are two audio commentaries: one with director Danny Boyle (where he talks about the story, Steve Jobs, and the production) and the other with editor Elliot Graham and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.  The Sorkin and Graham commentary track is the much more interesting of the two commentaries as it is about the crafting of the story through the script and editing.  They mention 30 to 40 minutes cut out of the movie including a few deleted and extended scenes (which I would have loved to see Universal include on the blu-ray, but they sadly didn’t include any of them with only a glimpse of one deleted sequence during the making-of documentary where the Mac talks).

 

The movie is presented in standard definition on DVD in 5.1 Dolby Digital and there is a code to download and stream a digital HD Ultraviolet copy of the film.

 

FINAL ANALYSIS: STEVE JOBS works due to the writing and the fantastic performance by Michael Fassbender as the title character.  I hope a future blu-ray edition includes deleted and extended scenes sadly lacking from this release.

 

This review is ©2-27-2015 David Blackwell and cannot be reprinted without permission.  Send all comments to feedback@enterline-media.com

 

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