It's all talk. No really, Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs is all talk. It illuminates the trick to making an Aaron Sorkin screenplay work - take all the talking and turn it into singing. There's rhythm in this rambling, only you'd hardly know it here. Boyle lets Sorkin's lines run furiously forward, a breathless tirade of information that's so extreme as to be ecstatic, or at least to try to. It's more exhausting than ecstatic, and the director allows the wordiness of the whole enterprise to expose flaws in his technique, flaws which weren't even there before - a general visual illiteracy, only alleviated by a handful of obvious aesthetic devices; an uneasy juxtaposition of sentimentality and cool. But bad Danny Boyle is still Danny Boyle, which is to remark that Steve Jobs is vivid and engaging, a popcorn movie crafted out of twisty technobabble and a theatrical structure that rather befits Sorkin's operatic stylisation. If it's baffling, it can be brilliantly baffling too, if it's irritating, it's only that way because it's so vigorous, so amped up on excitement for what it is creating that it can hardly help but leave us a little out of the loop. And maybe that's the point - maybe Steve Jobs is the future of filmmaking, a technical innovation to which our senses have not yet adjusted, a new frontier for its field. Maybe it's the latest, world-changing Apple gadget. Maybe. It just doesn't feel like it is to me. As far as I'm concerned, Steve Jobs is all talk.
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