Jobs

This Feelgood tragedy of the century isn't worth your money. Why the hell did they even make this movie in the first place!? Were there not enough documentaries and TV shows about Apple and Steve Jobs!? Did we really need a butchered version featuring Ashton Kutcher. They spent 8 and a half million dollars making a movie about a guy who already had a lot of movies already Why is Steve Jobsis portrayed here as some sort of hero? It just makes me so mad to think that they could get away with making something like this Spend your 14 dollars and get something to eat while you watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, a much better and much more accurate story of Steve Jobs and Apple's beginnings

Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) is shown starting from his college drop out years in 1974 to working at Atari in 1976. He joins up with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) bringing Woz's computer to Homebrew. With Woz, they start Apple in his garage. Former Intel guy Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) becomes their investor.

I'm sure Steve Jobs fans have a thousand mistakes they like to point out and a thousand more complaints about his douchie portrayal. I have a more simpler complaint. This is no more than a simple made-for-TV movie. Ashton Kutcher is doing more mimicry than actually taking on the persona. I actually put most of this on the shoulders of director Joshua Michael Stern. There are too many Jobs speeches and pontifications. It's an easy way to copy Steve. Maybe it's too easy. It needs to go deeper.

Let's see, well it was worth seeing for me; however, I wished I had waited till is came out on television -- Because it was really a "movie of the week"... do they still have those? To say this movie was weak on facts would imply they got it ALL wrong - Yes, they made some things up doing the "hollywood thing" but they didn't even attempt half the history so they couldn't have gotten it ALL wrong! Parts of his life missing were glaring!

They glossed over years -- Heck decades at points, concentrating on Apple more than Steve Jobs in my opinion... maybe a better name would have been "Apple & jobs - Some of the Years"!

Wait for the movie to hit your TV and know you will still be missing more than half the story!

I've seen this film and the one starring Michael Fassbender, "Steve Jobs". The difference between the two is this - This film shows a great deal of Steve's' life, with a real accent on the mid to late 70s as Apple was being created. The Fassbender film only shows three specific scenes in Steve's life, but by the time the film is through, even though Fassbender does not even resemble Steve Jobs, you feel like you are looking right at him because of Fassbender's electrifying performance. In "Jobs" Kutcher may be made up to look and walk like Jobs, but I never feel like I am getting into the head of Steve Jobs.

What does this film do well? The first half of it captures the look and feel of early home computing in a totally realistic way - the kind of people who were involved, the way that they dressed, what early homemade personal computers in the 1970s looked like. What did they look like? It was like the first cars when they were called "horseless carriages" because that's what people AND the inventors understood as the old paradigm. The horse was being replaced with an engine and the rest of the car looked like carriages always had looked. So the earliest computers had switches and lights and sat in unattractive blue boxes that engineers thought were great, but the average person had no idea what to do with such a thing and didn't want one.

What did this film do poorly? I'd say Steve Wozniak is presented as a mere shadow of himself here. You never see the camaraderie or dynamic between himself and Jobs. The old Home Brew Club looked up to Wozniak, and when he presents the first "Apple" computer to them they just look bored and Woz looks scared.

Finally I come to Ashton Kutcher. Ashton Kutcher's problem is that he did one of his earliest roles so well and so long - that of mega screw up Kelso in the long running TV comedy "That 70's Show". He did it so well in fact that I ALWAYS see Kelso whenever I see Kutcher, no matter how well he is performing. In this film I kept waiting for his 70's Show girlfriend, alpha female attack dog Jackie, to come jumping out of a dark corner and start yelling at him and tell him what a screw up he is. Kutcher can't help this. I call it "Norman Bates Syndrome" - the same thing that happened to Anthony Perkins. No matter what role Anthony Perkins took after Psycho, no matter how well he did it, he was always Norman Bates. You just kept waiting for him to hit somebody over the head and start preparing the body to add to his collection of stuffed animals/people.

This is not a terrible film on Jobs. Nobody does a bad job, and it is interesting from a history of personal computing perspective. I'd say see this one for the history, and watch the Fassbender rendition in "Steve Jobs" to get a feel for the essence of the man, who will always remain somewhat of an enigma.

Joshua Michael Stern's "Jobs" is like an assembly line for the best moments in the career of Steve Jobs, but seriously lacking in depth, and without much significance. It is a truly unremarkable biopic of the "master of innovation" as you could possibly imagine. "Jobs" follows an overly safe, unimaginative course that clocks in at a tiresome 122 minutes. The storytelling is painfully straightforward, covering only the principal events of his professional trials and tribulations, and providing little else beyond what is already public knowledge.

Developing his imagination for computer programming at Atari, Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) brings in his friend Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) to help with the hardware aspect, forming a partnership that would soon lead to the founding and development of Apple Computers, a force within the industry throughout the 1980s. Steve is not prepared for the financial demands and the ruthless business mentality, and is eventually forced out of the company he began, only to return in the 1990s with a fresh game plan on how to bring Apple back into the public consciousness, and to dominate the industry once again.

"Jobs" is a biopic with a very narrow focus, and without any sense of risk or adventure. It is so intent on covering Jobs' entire corporate career, that it simply reduces his personal life to a footnote. Stern completely glosses over Jobs' personal life, which is essential to any self-respecting biopic. The entire production feels rushed and slapped together simply to benefit from being the first one out of the gate.

To his credit, Kutcher puts forth a good effort, and he undeniably looks the part of Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, Ashton always looks like he is trying too hard to play the part, and never fully becomes the character he's portraying. His limitations on the big screen prove to be a major liability. He has developed a screen persona as likable character, which has served him well with numerous TV sitcoms. Not so much with movies.

What emerges is a movie that has "a made for TV" feel, which depicts a self-absorbed creep who stabs everyone in the back to simply to get his way that goes on for two plus hours. A thoroughly unsatisfying tribute, and we are still left none the wiser as to what made "The Father of the Digital Revolution" beyond what we already know.