Steve Jobs(R.I.P) October,5th,2011.
jOBS is not a biography movie like Citizen Kane, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, The Last King of Scotland, Malcolm X, and Gladiator. But it takes all the genre clichés from these movies, while following the same story structure of Social Network.
Since I mentioned David Fincher's movie Social Network, I will start my review with the major problem in jOBS: Considering Social Network was an aptly marketed everyone's hero style of an average business-drama movie, in order to market a Steve Jobs life story appropriately, this wasn't the right choice. The cause of this marketing errors are the trailer, the poster with Ashton Kutcher on it, and the movie itself with Ashton Kutcher starring in it.
Then what is jOBS about? jOBS is just a simple telling of a person's epoch-making achievement like Schindler's List, Spartacus, Raging Bull, Braveheart, Papillon, The Pianist, and even David Lnych's The Straight Story. jOBS has more than a few things in common with those movies including the pain of sacrificing your beloved ones in order to succeed in your career, including similar character traits, similar ethical beliefs, similar moral decisions. jOBS is only a brief telling of what Steve Jobs gave to the Macintosh computers, just like what Oscar Schindler gave to Jews, and what Braveheart gave to Scotland. You can't expect to see the birth and death of Steve Jobs in this movie. This is not a biopic, instead it's a drama, poorly marketed good business-drama.
There are both strong and weak points in the technical side of jOBS. As a start, having no narration is a strong point, yet having not explained why Steve Jobs dropped out from college is crucially a weak point. Ashton Kutcher takes his girlfriend and goes behind bushes in the country and smokes weed. Then we get to figure it out that Steve Jobs has dropped out from college because he smoked weed and got his girlfriend pregnant. Refusing the birth of his first child due to his busy work schedules, Steve Jobs character has been made more weaker and weaker minute after minute. There is certainly a rule of character growth followed in this film, but none of this film's audiences have really bought that character growing incidents.
This is an average business-drama movie, set in the world of entrepreneurial minds. You're lonely, you always keep a positive mind but always looking for a person to trust, you are goal-oriented, you take maximum risks for every little achievements in your life, you are a reliable friend to your colleagues but they are always afraid of you, and you see every step in your life as a competition with someone else's steps in their lives...
This is a strong premise that killed the sense of making a Steve Jobs movie to honor his memory. This movie should have been made in 1997, when Steve Jobs have become the de facto chief CEO of Macintosh. And this movie could have been titled "Think Differently" as this is what it is only about. If this has been a movie called "Think Differently" made in 1997, then it could earn some recognition. Now people would come to you and ask "What did Steve Jobs do for the last 14 years of his life as a CEO in Apple?"
