You may feel you’ve been here before: the story of a man who uses technology to bring millions of people together, but who can’t seem to figure out how to connect with the people who are actually around him.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin told that story a few years back in his script for the Facebook movie, The Social Network. Now, in Steve Jobs, he’s got a strikingly different, equally riveting take centered on the guy who put music in your pocket and gave the world a personal computer that said “Hello” — ideas that sounded crazy back when most of what computers did was make spreadsheets.
The film begins with a 1974 video clip, not of the title character but of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, speaking in a room dominated by an enormous industrial computer, about a then almost inconceivable future when average Joes would have computers in their own homes. He has to convince a skeptical interviewer that this might possibly be a good thing.
That year, a 19-year-old Jobs would’ve been planning a trip to India to study Buddhism, but in the next shot, we meet him a decade later, as he’s about to unveil the Macintosh personal computer to an audience whose appetite has been whetted by an Orwellian Ridley Scott commercial titled simply “1984.” The commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl, didn’t show the product, because the product wasn’t ready yet. And as Jobs, played with ferocious intensity by Michael Fassbender, stands backstage, preparing to introduce it, it still isn’t. For some reason, it won’t say “Hello.”