Review: 'Steve Jobs' plays man versus machine

Entertainment

Review: ‘Steve Jobs’ plays man versus machine

Aaron Sorkin has dispensed with the traditional format of the biopic, instead framing the life of the Apple co-founder and turtle-necked tech deity in three backstage dramas ahead of major product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, NeXT in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. It’s a scheme of three-act purity, as tightly compacted as the circuitry of an iPod, and one that few besides Sorkin would dare to attempt, writes AP’s Jake Coyle. Like the highly controlled aesthetic sensibility of Jobs himself, the movie is a closed system. Even in the first scenes, Jobs is trying to have the “Exit” signs covered for a show. Tell the fire marshals, he says, “We’re in here changing the world.”

Cloistered inside its claustrophobic casing, the movie hums with the high-processing capacity of Sorkin’s dialogue.

AP film critic Jake Coyle

He’s as puny as he is mighty, a flawed man who made perfect machines. "Steve Jobs" hangs heavily, melodramatically, on his relationship with Lisa. But as fraught as life is backstage, the thundering, foot-stomping audiences lurk outside. Michael Fassbender captures the thin-skinned sensitivity and detailed obsessiveness of Jobs. Sorkin’s dialogue crackles, and the film often does too. The full Sorkin treatment has electrified a well-trod subject. But it also smothers it in artifice. In “Steve Jobs,” Sorkin does the conducting.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable but really effective thing to do. It’s more than a practice, it’s more than a habit. … It’s a really wonderful ability.

Apple design chief Jony Ive