7/10
I guess The Social Network set us on a path of movies showing us how clever jerks got to be really rich jerks as each global giant successively gets their entry into the canon (stay tuned this year for Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc! Who will play Colonel Sanders in his biopic in 2018?!). Aaron Sorkin scripted this one as he did The Social Network. The dialogue certainly crackles, thanks in no small part to Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet who are both terrific, but it does veer into portentousness at times, with characters in the heat of an argument delivering clunky lines that are heavy-handedly meant to be interpreted as a metaphor for the scene as a whole.
The three product launch sequences that make up the movie are impressively mounted, although each feels more rote than the last - the movie has Jobs commenting on this repetitiveness in an attempt at self-awareness ("I feel like before every product launch people get drunk and tell me what they really think about me") but it doesn't make it feel less paint-by-numbers.
Like Moneyball, another Sorkin adaptation, there seems to be a fear of getting too technical - there with baseball stats, here with computer specs. Any technical sequence is immediately followed up with a hammy father-daughter scene as if to scramble to pull the viewer back in but frankly, as in Moneyball, I found the technical stuff way more interesting than the Hollywood schmaltz.
Overall it's a decent movie, the acting is the strength by far and the writing is solidly in second. I'm just not sure what all we were supposed to glean by sitting through it. We already knew that Sorkin could write and Fassbender could act and Boyle could direct and Jobs was a jerk who took more credit than he deserved.
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