From the trailers & preview material I was worried the movie might be deceptive. Specifically the scenes with Woz and Jobs in the parking lot and later in the office. In an interview Wozniak said the parking lot conversation never took place and got the underlying feelings incorrect. That made me jump to the conclusion that the preview's portrayal of the office scene where Woz leaves Apple would be equally misleading. In context it is actually much more believable.
I was surprised by the technical accuracy (ha, what do I know?) and so I feel much better about recommending it to people who show interest.
There were parts that I enjoyed more than Pirates of Silicon valley, but also times when it felt long. Music was used to okay effect, but also drawn out.
Movie Spoiler: There is no recent history portrayed in the film.
Edit: A couple more thoughts.
Contrary to the inaccuracies between Jobs and Wozniak mentioned above (and as noted in the linked article) the movie did accurately give Wozniak credit for doing the engineering on Breakout (and getting shortchanged in the process) which I felt was important.
The movie only really covers Jobs at Apple, a bit of University and family, so if you are interested in NeXT/Pixar/etc. you may be disappointed.
Pirates of Silicon was great, not just Jobs/Woz, but the rivalry with Gates and IBM. I felt it covered most bases pretty well, not sure I have much need to watch this.
I haven't seen it, but I hope they show in the end that it is just not important to be a successful entrepreneur, but a good human being as well, which Steve Jobs failed miserably at.
Yes, it also had a big impact (of course, negative) on the culture of 'healthy competition' that once used to be the case in the pre-Apple era. Steve Jobs ensured that someone, somewhere is always in a 'face-palm' position reading/hearing about patents on "pinch to zoom", "slide to unlock", rounded corners, icons in a grid, wedge shape, and many more, while they went on to steal more.
I think in a different way. Beyond the negative aspects of Apple (and, specifically, every public company in a powerful situation like Microsoft or Google) I thank them for pushing the mobile state of the art forward. In a few years we will have more options with that move.
Steve should kick a puppy at some point in the movie to drive home how irredeemably evil he was. Maybe they could have him wear a black hat the whole time so small children will understand he's the bad guy.
Sure about that? His family clearly loved him and miss him, and so do a lot of the colleagues that spent the most time with him, like Tim Cook and Jony Ive.
Have you read his biography by Walter Isaacson? I think there is no doubt in the tech community whatsoever that he was an ass with people, he cheated his own company people, and also his friend Mr. Wozniak. Also, Jony Ive 'considered him' as a friend, but quoting him :
"He [Jobs] will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, 'That's no good. That's not very good. I like that one,'" Ive told Isaacson. "And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs."
The Isaacson bio got quite a lot of stuff wrong - both personal and technical stuff. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend John Siracusa's podcast book review "The Wrong Guy": http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 (skip the first 17.5 minutes to get to the review proper.)
Just got back from watching the movie. Kutcher does a really good job channeling Jobs. A couple of scenes were over-dramatized, but overall it was a very watchable movie. It got off to a slow start, but after that it was well-paced and kept my interest. I enjoyed it and will probably see it again.
The critics are pretty harsh on it, but if you're at all interested in the subject matter, it's definitely worth seeing. I thought it was flawed but interesting.
I saw an early screening of the movie. Here were my general thoughts:
1. Kutcher did a fantastic job as Steve Jobs. I was extremely pleasantly surprised by how well he portrayed the role and adopted Steve's mannerisms. You can even see his gait and speech evolve over the course of the movie.
2. My fundamental problem with the film was that it tried to cram so much into two hours that a lot of scenes felt fake and over-simplified to the point of being insulting. Extreme examples of this include the "I'm going to sue Bill Gates" scene and the Jony Ive scene.
3. The beginning is stupid and irrelevant. Also, Jobs's transition from idealistic hippy acid-dropper to steely-eyed businessman is portrayed in a manner of seconds and does not feel realistic whatsoever.
4. I still enjoyed the movie and would watch it again if it were on television. It certainly had emotionally moving scenes, and I wouldn't say it was a poor movie.
Are we going to have a movie about Norman Borlaug, Dennis Richie or Douglas Engelbart as well? What made the movie industry pick Jobs as the topic? I honestly don't understand it.
Unless you can sell their stories in the time proven 127 minute, 2 peaks setup and market them to a major studio, I doubt it will get any traction.
The only other option would be that the people who care about it fund it, but even though that pool might seem large inside of the tech microcosmos, it's comparitively small, and you'll have a low budget movie that has trouble being shown in theaters.
Engelbart could actually make a movie character, given his obsession with improving the human intellect through computers. It's questionable though whether you can work his life into a movie script that has popular apeal whilst respecting the work he has done.
Borlaugs work could be worked into a movie as well, but it suffers from the same problems that making a movie about Engelbart has. It's tough creating an accurate portrayal of his life whilst having a dramatic story arch in there.
That's part of the reason why the Social Network has such strange set of priorities. I doubt that the court case and the unrequited love story were integral parts in Facebook becomming Facebook, but they fit the story, and the love story likely beat the film over the 2 demographics line.
So in any case, we're the best you can do is either a small film that represents their life accurately (with all the nitpicking that will come with it), or a huge film that twists their lives into 127 minutes screentime and will likely irritate the very people that asked for it. Because if Universal went out and made a biopic about Dennis Richie, there'd be a 1809 Comment thread discussing how they didn't put enough focus on his work in kernel design.
Were better off without a big movie about any of them, however much that may hurt.
What really confuses me is why there isn't a major movie about Richard Feynman. His life is a movie script. Worked on nuclear missles, had his wife, and longtime love interest die of tuberculosis (granted, there is a movie about that part), and so much other stuff that would just fit perfectly. But I digress.
Made a lot of sense, thanks for the writeup. Probably I am just silly for not understanding why our society doesn't cherish people who had so much more impact on our lives.
You can only cherish what you know. And knowing something takes effort, and even more effort the more obscure (as in hidden) the thing is. Now obscurity doesn't mean the thing is less important. A watches clockwork is obscured by it's face and it's hands, but without a clockwork, the watch would be useless.
But far more people will see the watch face than the clockwork (some watches expose it partially to show craftsmanship, but we hide it as well as we can). It's not that people wouldn't cherish the work of these men if they knew it ("Oh, Engelbart, he's the reason you see clickable pictures on your screen instead of a flashing cursor" "That's pretty cool, never heard of the guy before"), but they simply don't know them.
Really, if we want these men to be appreciated for their impact, it's us that have to go out and spread the word, because we're the only ones knowing that impact. If we're not ready for spreading that awareness (I don't think it's easy to do), then appreciation of the clockwork by watchmakers is what we'll have to be satisfied with.
Well, you can spin it that way, but trying to say that Apple had no impact on lives of many people would not be fair. And more importantly that impact was quite recent. iPod and ITMS early 2000, iPhone 2007, iPad 2013. Another point is, you can experience those products directly. You can see, touch and use them. Joe User does not see and touch C.
Yes, nobody denies the importance of C. But honestly, can you say what Ritchie was working on for the last 25 years?
The claim, that withous C we would be in the stone age of the computing is as credible as the claim, that without Jobs we would not have web, because it was developed on NeXT machine. And early Mac system was written in Pascal…
iPod came out in 2001, the iTunes Music Store was opened in 2003, iPad was released in 2010. I would also add iMac (1998) and WebKit (2003) to the list, as they too have had quite an impact on the market overall.
Because most people are obsessed with the popular kids at high school. Which I will wager you didn't understand either, or you wouldn't be commenting on HN :)
They surveyed 1000 people on which person they'd like to see a movie about. 999 people chose Steve Jobs because he's well known, has an interesting history and personality, the stories around his death were plastered all over the media for months, and they had absolutely no fucking clue who those other people were. One person picked Douglas Englebart, but was later disappointed to learn that he had misread the selection and it wasn't about Englebert Humperdinck.
Is it really that hard to understand that people aren't going to spend millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars on a movie if no one is going to see it.
It's quite likely that given the reviews on this Steve Jobs movie, not many people are going to see it. Aaron Sorkin probably has a much more entertaining version in the works.
as Steve Jobs? His life is up to the very end the stuff many a film can be made of.
Imagine just one of the most recent the scenes: being on the hospital bed weighting like 50 pounds and rejecting the medicine equipment that was "not designed nicely enough!"
Even his "bad" side is what makes his life more thankful for films.
Its not because you have charisma that it necessarily means you use it in a positive way in the world. Drm, walled gardens, patent mentality, i can name a few reasons why Jobs should not be glorified.
Not every film protagonist is there as a positive role model. Especially not in every his aspect. It would be more than boring. Pragmatically, often are the "bad guys" even more attractive for the film that wants to have more viewers. The producers want to push the viewers' emotions.
I'm claiming again: even Jobs' bad sides are very thankful for films! Hey, we're talking about the guy who drove without the license plates and parked at the parking areas for those with disabilities. Absolutely perfect for a movie.
I think you misunderstand what I am saying. I don't care about JObs smoking weed or being on LSD, I care more about the total absence of criticism for his vision of Computing.
Unlike the others, Englebart didn't directly accomplish very much. Most of his work was a long way removed from anything that was commercially viable. Seeming prophetic is nice, but actually getting stuff done is better. The relevant Jobs quote is "Real artists ship" - Englebart was not good at that part. Which is what got him kicked out of SRI.
Some of what was shown in The Mother of All Demos had been done elsewhere better - his group suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome. He was enamored with the idea of one big software program that did everything (badly) rather than a lot of component parts that do specific things well - sort of the polar opposite of Dennis Ritchie's approach to problem solving. So his team had a program that did email and text editing and videoconferencing and drawing but didn't do any of those things as well as a system that focused specifically on any one of those things.
On the plus side, he had lots of severe personal setbacks (including at one point his house burning down) that could be played up for melodrama. And the end was poignant. And he did patent the mouse. And some of his most oddball ideas seem even more prophetic today (life-blogging) while others are weird enough to be entertaining on their own (chorded one-hand keyboards).
There is certainly a niche for this and the others, but they're probably best served by direct documentaries, like BBS or Get Lamp. They're entertaining and informative and every bit as watchable as a fictionalized biopic.
Although having Douglas Englebart arriving at the mother of all demos on the back of a triceratops would be worth paying to see.
I was surprised by the technical accuracy (ha, what do I know?) and so I feel much better about recommending it to people who show interest.
There were parts that I enjoyed more than Pirates of Silicon valley, but also times when it felt long. Music was used to okay effect, but also drawn out.
Movie Spoiler: There is no recent history portrayed in the film.
Edit: A couple more thoughts. Contrary to the inaccuracies between Jobs and Wozniak mentioned above (and as noted in the linked article) the movie did accurately give Wozniak credit for doing the engineering on Breakout (and getting shortchanged in the process) which I felt was important.
The movie only really covers Jobs at Apple, a bit of University and family, so if you are interested in NeXT/Pixar/etc. you may be disappointed.