Steve Jobs was an amazing man. Obviously intelligent and a visionary and without him the home computer, iPod, iPhone, etc. would not be the facts they are in our lives. Jobs is a shallow and incomplete biography of his life which fails to make us understand the how or why of his accomplishments.

Ashton Kutcher is okay as the film’s namesake, although it is more of an imitation than an artistic interpretation. Apparently the real man was not a very likable person (Jobs died in 2011) and this comes across in spades. The film follows his life from his barefoot hippie days (too many scenes of drug use) as a college dropout to when he and technical wiz friend Woz (Josh Gad) design a home computer and start Apple Computers in his parent’s garage. That part of the movie is the best. However much of the later film is taken up by the not so interesting battles for control of Apple and how his ambitions fail former friends and colleagues.

But it leaves out big chunks of his life, including his involvement with creating Pixar. You don’t get a real understanding of the man or his motivations. It’s hard not to compare this film with much better The Social Network, about the beginnings of facebook, which features a better performance by Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. There, at least, you get an understanding of another flawed technology visionary. Jobs does not do the man justice.

Rating: three deer out of five

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Alf Cryderman is a Red Deer freelance writer and old movie buff.