Going into Jobs, I really didn’t have high expectations. Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. Seriously, Ashton Kutcher was cast as Steve Jobs? They cast Kelso, the idiot of the gang in That 70’s Show, as Steve Jobs. It’s so weird that I had to type it twice. I did not lose all hope, though, because Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) was cast as Harvey Milk in 2008’s Milk, which turned out surprisingly well. Anyway, I was able to sit through the 128 minutes, which seemed to last about 2 hours.
My overall opinion of the movie, was that it was pretty bad.
I’ll start out with the cons of the movie. First, director Joshua Michael Stern jumped too far into Jobs’s life in the beginning. He didn’t focus on his home life, when he was born, or any of his childhood. Stern started the movie with Steve Jobs in college. Usually in a movie, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re doing a biopic, it’s nice to give a little bit of knowledge prior to something major like that. One of the only biographies that I think can actually make it work that way is The Doors (1991) with Val Kilmer, but even that showed an important event in the beginning from Jim Morrison’s childhood that would play a key role in his life.
My second problem with the movie was that it only showed Steve Jobs before he really broke ground with the iPhone or iPad. The movie portrayed him from when he first started Apple with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), up until the mid 1990’s where he was appointed as Apple’s CEO. I will give Stern credit, however, for opening the movie with him introducing the iPod in 2001, which was what I believe a lot of people were expecting to see more of.
The third main con of this movie was that they made Steve Jobs look like too much of a jerk. From what I’ve read, I understand that he was a jerk and a control freak of sorts. Still, you can’t have a movie just documenting the times where he screws over his friends.
I could go on and on for a whole hour just pointing out the cons in the film, but its time that I point out the pros in the movie. I thought that Ashton Kutcher did play an okay Steve Jobs. At first I felt as if I was watching the kid from Dude, Where’s My Car? It did feel a bit like Steve Jobs as the film went on but there was still that reminder of Kelso though because of his recognizable voice.
Another one of the few things I did enjoy about the film was the scene where Wozniak told Steve Jobs that he was quitting. I thought that the monologue Josh Gad gave was heartbreaking in a way, because he played a major role in building Apple Computers, and to see someone who was there from the start leave was really upsetting.
Though the movie did have a couple good scenes and a pretty good soundtrack, the film was bad overall. You could tell that writer Matt Whiteley and Stern put in a lot of effort when it came to dialogue since the movie is dialogue heavy, which in a way makes it seem longer than it is.
In all honesty, I don’t recommend Jobs to the average movie fan. However, if you are an Ashton Kutcher fan go check it out.
