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About the Movie
Academy Award®-winning director Alex Gibney [Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief] pulls no punches in his portrait of Apple founder Steve Jobs and his legacy. This probing and unflinching look at the life and aftermath of the bold, brilliant and at times ruthless iconoclast explores what accounted for the grief of so many when he died.
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Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
76%- Reviews Counted: 76
- Fresh: 58
- Rotten: 18
- Average Rating: 7.1/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: Mr. Gibney, a prolific documentarian, not only charts Mr. Jobs's extraordinary record of marketing and innovation, but also presents a merciless anatomy of a complicated public character.
Fresh: Gibney's built a powerful and compelling case-even if much of the ground he covers won't be news to anyone who follows Apple.
Fresh: Gibney is certainly good at what he does, and "Steve Jobs" is at its best in providing a brisk summation of the man's life. Or, more accurately, lives, for Jobs seemed to have been more people than one would have thought possible.
Rotten: Despite the movie's journalistic substance, the pleasure-free banality of its style gets in the way of a view of Jobs himself, whose work is as much aesthetic as it is industrial.
Customer Reviews
Enjoyed it, but Conflicted
Johnathan Kim wrote it best:
"Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and the man credited with bringing both personal computers and advanced mobile electronics to the masses, died on October 5, 2011. But the battle to define both the man and his legacy is being waged right now in the form of several books and high-profile films, the latest of which is the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man In the Machine, from Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, a man I’ve interviewed in the past and whose work I greatly respect.
That’s why it really bums me out that The Man In the Machine makes little attempt to portray someone who was, by most accounts, a complex, iconic, but all-too-flawed man who, over the course of his career, could be both inventor and thief, monk and businessman, brat and sage, tyrant and beloved leader, and managed to use those conflicting traits to both change the world and create the most valuable, influential, and admired company on the planet. Instead, The Man In the Machine is focused largely on the thesis that Jobs was always and only a jerk, that people who enjoy Apple products and admire Jobs are idiots and cult members, and that the computer revolution that was born of Jobs’ vision must inevitably contain the same ugly darkness Gibney feels is Jobs’ defining trait, despite any evidence to the contrary."
Garbage
A cherry picked, opinionated and exaggerated piece that strings together events to paint a certain kind of picture.
Making Gizmodo the victim in their own crime? Please.
I'm not unfamiliar with any of what has been included in this piece, and it becomes abundantly obvious the way it's cut together is to make false associations. True information, intercut with meaningless opinions from meaningless interviewees, is not a documentary.
Something Is Off
The movie is interesting and highlights things we should think about. But the longer I watched the more determined it seemed to make its point by cherry picking topics. And it often lent a slant or emotional tone that was manufactured and often downright misleading.
And there is a trivialization of the enabling nature of what he did. And an almost determined effort to obscure that people connected to him for his vision and success - to be a part of something thoughtful in a world of products and things so often reeking of the lowest common denominator.
In the end it feels dishonest, like propaganda. Not for it’s choice of focus, but for it’s intellectual falseness.
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