'Steve Jobs' trailer: Check out Michael Fassbender as the tech giant
The upcoming movie, which is based on the bestselling Walter Isaacson biography of the same name, co-stars Seth Rogen and Kate Winslet and has an Oscar-friendly release date in October. Jobs's life has been adapted for the screen before, with actor Ashton Kutcher taking on the role.
Benoit Tessier/Reuters
A new trailer has arrived for the upcoming biopic “Steve Jobs.”
The new film is based on the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder by Walter Isaacson and stars Michael Fassbender, who recently starred in the movie “Slow West” and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “12 Years a Slave."
The movie co-stars actor Seth Rogen as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, who worked at Macintosh in its early days.
The trailer has Wozniak asking, “What do you do? You’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board, the graphical interface was stolen. So how come ten times a day, I read, ‘Steve Jobs is a genius’? What do you do?”
“Musicians play their instruments,” Jobs replies. “I play the orchestra.”
The project comes with a hefty pedigree. It’s directed by Danny Boyle, who won a Best Director Oscar for his 2008 movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” and the screenplay for the film was written by Aaron Sorkin, who recently got audiences enthralled by a story about technology (and won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his work) with the 2010 movie “The Social Network.”
Maybe you’re thinking: "Wasn’t there already a biopic about Steve Jobs?" The answer is yes. In 2013, a movie about Jobs’s life starring Ashton Kutcher of “Two and a Half Men” as Jobs and “Frozen” actor Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak was released, but it came out to poor reviews, with NPR writer Mark Jenkins, for one, writing that the film doesn’t “seriously exert itself to examine psychology or illustrate character … merely serviceable” and writing that Kutcher’s “approach is to ape Jobs's speech and movements, which he does quite well. Whether mimicry qualifies as characterization is a question for 'Jobs' viewers to answer for themselves.” However, Jenkins called Gad “fine.”
The movie disappeared quickly and now there’s this new take, which boasts an acclaimed cast (Winslet won one Oscar and has been nominated for five others) and, with its October release date, could be an Oscar contender.
The question is, has the Hollywood trend "do-overs" now reached staid biopics? Audiences have been seeing it more and more with big-budget franchises over the past few years, with the “Spider-Man” movies, the “Hulk” movies, the “Superman” films, and the “Fantastic Four” series all being remade often only several years after the last try (if it stays on schedule, three years will separate “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” with Andrew Garfield and a new Spidey movie set for 2017 with Tom Holland, making the 10-year stretch between takes on “Fantastic Four” seem positively lengthy).
If the new take on Jobs’s life is good enough, perhaps audiences won’t mind.