Movies about Jobs and managing expectations

2013 Jobs

So, last night, as I watched the trailer for the new “Steve Jobs” movie starring Michael Fassbender, this clip from a 2013 “Jobs” movie starring Ashton Kutcher appeared as a side bar recommendation.

It shows Kutcher as Jobs firing one of his engineers, and this scene painfully reminded me of a disaster this movie was. I personally feel that Kutcher’s performance was comically bad, in this scene he looks like he tries not to burst out laughing. Dialog is artificial and most of the main characters are one-dimensional, including Steve, and the amount of historical inaccuracies in this “biographical” film is just staggering, which Steve Wozniak confirmed in his interview with Bloomberg.

Whether you think Steve jobs was a genius or an insensitive, arrogant prick (or both) this movie certainly doesn’t do him justice.

1999 Pirates of Silicon Valley

Actually, the last time I was satisfied by portrayal of Steve Jobs on film was a 1999 “Pirates of Silicon Valley” TV movie that tells the story of the early days of Apple and Microsoft.

This movie was very entertaining to me, and the personalities, events and dialogues corresponded to what actually happened in real life.

This is even confirmed by the Woz —

“The entire movie was truthful … the wording, the people, how they acted … so, everything really in the movie happened, I just thought that it was the greatest way to portray the whole story, it was so entertaining.”

2015 Steve Jobs

A lot has happened since 1999 for Steve and Apple therefore I am really excited about the 2015 release of “Steve Jobs”, and hoping that this time the story will be told infinitely better than in 2013 (shouldn’t be that hard really).

Although I think Fassbender doesn’t look like Steve Jobs that much I have great hopes for his performance. The trailer looks good, and the rest of the cast looks promising. Script for the 2013 Jobs was probably the worst thing about the film, which Wozniak also commented about in interview with Bloomberg—

I got an early script, I read it, my wife read it, and we were kind of abhor by it.

He also mentions helping Aaron Sorkin on the 2015 “Steve Jobs” with the script in a much healthier way than he helped with the 2013 Jobs script, Woz says —

… as far as I know there is no script written, in other words they will take the input, the input from the first hand sources, and create script from it, rather than first hand source coming in “can you modify the script here and there” …

Have you seen the movie?

Did it fulfill your expectations?