Recensioni de* critic*

A series of epic walk-and-talks about the future retconned to be 100 percent correct because they're about our present. For example, the Amazing Steve predicts that journalism will change because of computers. (He says that in 1998, the same year Aaron Sorkin found out.) By the end, when Super Steve tells his estranged daughter he will invent the iPod for her, the movie is indistinguishable from a TV commercial.

Like The Social Network, also scripted by Sorkin, Steve Jobs seems so eager to make its subject comprehensible that it threatens to flatten what should be intriguing and strange into an all too familiar, bland narrative.

The Social Network had the right idea, downgrading Zuckerberg in its second half; Steve Jobs, locked into theatrical structure, can't do that, and suffers accordingly. The first 30 minutes are dazzling, the whole is less than the sum of its parts – but still so deft and snappy and exuberant, and Jobs himself does exude some of the magnetism he must've had in real life. A jerk, a force of Nature. A megalomaniac. A great artist. A seller of gadgets.

There are things to like about Steve Jobs (the energy of the first act, much of Seth Rogen's performance), but for the most part, it plays like an object lesson in how to get the least out of a highly stylized approach, and whatever whiff of integrity it might have is snuffed out by the maudlin ending. The use of a different format (Super 16mm, 35mm, digital) is a low-maintenance substitute for doing anything interesting with the camera.

...What I think you're pointing to is this achingly overt desire to use the intelligence of the dialogue, with the characters spraying perfectly crafted aperçus at every opportunity, as a proof for the intelligence of the screenwriter – and, by extension, a validation of the intelligence of the spectator, who enjoys sitting back and consuming these twirling arabesques of quick-witted repartee.

Steve Jobs should really be named Aaron Sorkin. It would make for fairer advertising of the product. Anyone hoping to gain fresh insight about Jobs himself will leave the film frustrated. We already know the CEO was a manic bully and outsmarter. The problem is not that this is untrue but that it is not a full enough explanation of his genius.

Steve Jobs is scuppered by its repetitive nature, with Sorkin's overly verbose dialogue and Boyle's proclivity for on-the-nose visual statements sorely testing the patience, even if one is prepared for them.

It's extremely entertaining. It's also – as you realise once it's over – quite shallow. Sorkin has always had a tendency to lecture us on his pet political topics: here the smartest person in the room, so boneheaded about interpersonal relationships and credit due, apparently learns not to be such a dick to partners and colleagues and children. Obviously it's not the worst message to be promoting, but it's a feelgood letdown.

The closing night gala Steve Jobs, as directed by Danny Boyle, likewise feels overly mainstream not because it lacks ambition but rather because as written by Aaron Sorkin, it feels like an extended episode of one of his television series many of which I admire a good deal more.

Onstage, this kind of insular, highly structured approach would be fairly standard, even schematic. On film, it could come across as, well, stagy. But Boyle does something surprising with Sorkin's endless cascades of dialogue: He turns them into music. There's an internal rhythm to Steve Jobs — to the restless back-and-forth, to the free flow of accusations, protestations and duplicities — that's toe-tappingly infectious.

The problem with "Steve Jobs" isn't its departures from facts about Jobs's life that can be rapidly gleaned from a glance at Walter Isaacson's biography of him... It's the fact that the fictionalized elements of the movie don't produce increased insight into Jobs, and don't lead to a grasp of Jobs's spirit in exchange for the reportorial letter of his life story.

As with most Sorkin-scripted films, the chief pleasure here is watching a terrific cast perform Olympic-standard verbal gymnastics without a safety net. That each scene plays out against a countdown to showtime only heightens the tension.