I went and saw the new Steve Jobs movie last night, the Danny Boyle one with Michael Fassbender, and I've been turning it over in my head all morning instead of doing literally any of the work I'm supposed to be doing today.
Quick context for anyone who stumbled onto this blog without being steeped in Apple trivia: this is the second Jobs biopic in about two years. Ashton Kutcher played him in that 2013 movie that's mostly just a footnote now. This one's got a real pedigree though. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, and it's not really a biography so much as three extended backstage arguments, each one set right before a big product launch. The 1984 Macintosh unveiling, the NeXT "black cube" launch in 1988 that nobody remembers because NeXT computers were a commercial disaster, and the 1998 iMac launch. That's the whole movie, structurally. Three rooms, three countdowns to curtain, a parade of the same six or seven people yelling at Jobs about the same handful of grievances in each one.
I liked it more than I expected to, and also found it kind of exhausting, which I think is the intended experience honestly.
Fassbender doesn't look anything like Jobs, and the movie doesn't even try that hard to fix that. No crazy prosthetics, no digitally aged skin, none of it. What he's doing is playing the rhythm of Sorkin's dialogue, which is its own specific skill, walk-and-talk sentences that never really breathe. Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman and her accent wanders around Eastern Europe a little more than I'd like, but she's the actual emotional center of the thing, more than Fassbender is half the time. Seth Rogen plays Woz and gets the one scene that's honestly a gut punch, the argument before the 1988 launch where he just wants Jobs to acknowledge the Apple II team by name on stage. Small ask. Jobs treats it like Woz asked him to donate a kidney.
My one real complaint, and I'll admit this is a me problem more than a movie problem: I've read enough of the actual history (the Isaacson book, mostly, plus a pile of old Folklore.org stories) that I kept getting snagged on the compressed timeline of it all. Real backstage arguments before a product launch do not resolve into tidy three-minute emotional climaxes with a clean button on them. Nobody's life works that way and Sorkin knows that, he just doesn't care, because he's not writing a documentary. Once I let go of wanting it to be accurate and just let it be a well-built piece of theater with an Apple logo stapled to it, I enjoyed myself a lot more.
Went with my friend Dev to the 7:40 showing at the theater by our old apartment, the one with the sticky floors that's somehow still in business after all these years. Eleven fifty for a ticket now, which felt like a lot until I remembered what I paid for the popcorn.
Small tangent, because apparently this is what my brain does now instead of writing a normal movie review: I run this blog's traffic stats through a service that stores its data on servers in Ireland, and this week the EU's top court threw out the Safe Harbor agreement that a decade of American companies have been quietly relying on to move European user data across the Atlantic without a mess of individual approvals. I read the ruling summary between rounds of googling Jobs movie trivia and mostly just felt tired on behalf of every compliance person in San Francisco who's got a rough month ahead. Doesn't affect a blog with maybe forty regular readers, probably. Still strange to watch something that dry turn into front page tech news in the same week I'm out watching a movie about a guy who once threw a demo across a room because a scroll bar looked wrong to him.
Go see the movie if you liked the rhythm of The Social Network and don't mind that almost nothing happens except people talking fast in hallways for two hours. Skip it if what you actually want is a Jobs documentary, because that's not remotely what this is, and I don't think it's pretending otherwise past the poster art.
I'm going back for the iMac scene alone, probably. There's a bit right before the finale that got me more than I expected a movie about product launches to get me.