Perhaps one of the most unfortunate but inevitable reactions to Alex Gibney's "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" was that it was an "attack" from the Apple co-founder. It is not. There's no question that the film is so scrutinized about Jobs' cult of personality that it goes a long way toward dismantling it steve jobs the man in the machine review . But it's part of a complex portrait that bestows Jobs' world-changing talents as important as his personal flaws.
Unlike most Gibney documentaries, which are told in a standard third-person style, often with no narration, this one has a more personal tone from the start, as a way of acknowledging and exploring reality more than any other character. many. Jobs put the "person" in the personal computer and the many increasingly private devices that came with it. As one interviewee put it, he created machines that "felt like an extension of myself."
Even if you don't remember where or what you were doing when the Apple co-founder died, you may have felt the news when you heard it. Thousands of people left flowers and handwritten notes outside Apple stores around the world to mourn his passing.
Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's new documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, seeks to uncover why so many people feel close to Jobs, even if they've never met him. It's a great movie for a number of reasons, but mostly because you're going to start watching it to get to know Jobs and eventually yourself.
Gibney, a prolific documentary filmmaker who recently made a splash with his draconian Church of Scientology film "Going Clear," isn't known for beating around the bush. I've seen a lot of Steve Jobs in print and film over the years, and based on the ruthlessness of "Going Clear," I went into "The Man in the Machine" expecting something similar.
It turns out that Gibney's thoughtful, well-paced examination of Jobs breaks through the reality-bending realm that Jobs built around himself and Apple.
The film points out that Jobs' genius was in customizing the computer (Lisa was the first), but it also reveals that this drive came from a rather messy place. In addition to being deeply conflicted about being a father, Jobs felt both rejected and favored for being adopted. Jobs also somehow conveyed this confusion to us. Our iPhones connect us with distant friends and family, but we spend more and more time alone with them, seduced by machines that can never truly satisfy us.
Gibney's film concludes that Jobs had the paranoid focus of a monk but not the compassion of a human being, and makes a strong case. Jobs' life was astounding, the significance of which could be studied for centuries, and Gibney didn't belittle his genius. At the heart of the film, however, may be the ex-girlfriend who says Job "fucked him up." How is that? Jobs accomplished things most of us could never dream of. Yet Gibney's film examines Apple's ideals from a forensic perspective as a farce of ambivalence, callousness, and nonsense folly, even as the product itself continues to prove almost irresistible.
