Review: 'Steve Jobs' Is An Electrifying Interpretive Dance Of Abstract Biographical Cinema

Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs is a lightning bolt of pure cinematic energy. Rather than lay out the complete career and/or life of its protagonist, the three-part film distils an essence, an interpretation from three pivotal moments, offering key snapshots that race along on a quickened pace and a propulsive moment that rarely lets up. Yes, it’s Aaron Sorkin doing Aaron Sorkin to the point of near self-parody, but the cocktail works. Filled with superb performances and lively exchanges with the hindsight of history in a bottle, Steve Jobs is genuinely electrifying entertainment that never lets up. It contains not one explosion, not one moment of violence, nor a hint of sexual content or overtly scandalous content. And yet it is riveting and breathlessly exciting from beginning to end.

The Review:

Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs is a lightning bolt of pure cinematic energy. Rather than lay out the complete career and/or life of its protagonist, the three-part film distils an essence, an interpretation from three pivotal moments, offering key snapshots that race along on a quickened pace and a propulsive moment that rarely lets up. Yes, it’s Aaron Sorkin doing Aaron Sorkin to the point of near self-parody, but the cocktail works. Filled with superb performances and lively exchanges with the hindsight of history in a bottle, Steve Jobs is genuinely electrifying entertainment that never lets up. It contains not one explosion, not one moment of violence, nor a hint of sexual content or overtly scandalous content. And yet it is riveting and breathlessly exciting from beginning to end. — PING!

Steve Jobs biopic Review
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Another review from Philip Elmer-DeWitt writing for Fortune:

'Steve Jobs': A talky, nerdy, brilliant drama in three acts

by Philip Elmer-DeWitt — OCTOBER 7, 2015, 8:37 AM EDT

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs — Courtesy of Universal
If you care about Apple, it’s a must-see. For the rest of you, not so much.
To say I’ve been looking forward to this movie is an understatement. Apple is my beat. Aaron Sorkin—whose credits include The West Wing, Moneyball, and The Social Network—is my favorite screenwriter. One of my readers counted the number of stories I’ve already written about the project. This will be my 18th.
To cut to the chase: I loved it.
Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs—which opens Friday in select theaters—is fast, smart and insightful, with flashes of brilliance and lots of nerdy in-jokes the aficionado will appreciate. (I’m a footnote in one of them, having helped report the 1982 Time Magazine Machine of the Year issue that brought the real Steve Jobs to tears.)
Officially, the film is based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography. In reality, the script bears only a casual relationship to the facts of Steve Jobs’ life. It’s not the cradle-to-grave biopic Sorkin decided early on he didn’t want to write. It’s not the hit job the defenders of Jobs’ memory feared.
What it is is a vehicle for what Sorkin does best: Drill down to his characters’ deepest psychic conflicts—or what he imagines them to be—and have them talk it out in brainy dialogue that is literally breathless (an effect director Danny (Slumdog Millionaire) Boyle achieves by editing out his actors’ pauses to take a breath).
Sorkin’s three-act format—the 40 minutes or so leading up to Jobs’ keynotes for the Mac, the NeXT workstation and the iMac—is both a strength and a weakness. It gives the movie an easy-to-grasp tentpole structure; it wears a little thin by Act 3.
Aaron Sorkin is like Apple. You either love him or hate him. If you care about Steve Jobs and you like Sorkin, you’re in for a treat.

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