Brilliantly, we don’t see these presentations, only the rock star build-up (stamping feet, Mexican waves) in a series of increasingly imposing auditoriums, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House in which Boyle pointedly stages Jobs’s planned Phantom-style revenge on Apple, the company from which he was ousted in ’85. Ironically, there is a woman at the centre of Jobs’s life and, indeed, the centre of this film marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, who serves as both conscience and confidante as her boss bullies his way through a series of pre-launch backstage bust-ups. Most significantly, both The Social Network and Steve Jobs focus on men who precipitate quantum shifts in the science of human interaction while signally failing to communicate with the women in their lives – Mark Zuckerberg’s dramatic estrangement from girlfriend Erica Albright mirrored and amplified in Jobs’s abandonment of former partner Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and denial of their disputed daughter, Lisa. Recurrent too is a reliance upon the support of a less charismatic partner who is snubbed as success comes calling: Andrew Garfield’s Facebook wingman Eduardo Saverin, and Seth Rogen’s tech-savvy Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. Both are stories of brittle whizz kids who spy a technological opening in the public marketplace that they then exploit with quasi-missionary zeal. Playing out over the course of three product launches – the original Apple Macintosh in 1984, the cuboid NeXT Computer in 88 and the stylish iMac in 98 – Steve Jobs is a thematic companion piece to Sorkin’s The Social Network and was indeed originally slated to share its director, David Fincher.
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