I've seen this film and the one starring Michael Fassbender, "Steve Jobs". The difference between the two is this - This film shows a great deal of Steve's' life, with a real accent on the mid to late 70s as Apple was being created. The Fassbender film only shows three specific scenes in Steve's life, but by the time the film is through, even though Fassbender does not even resemble Steve Jobs, you feel like you are looking right at him because of Fassbender's electrifying performance. In "Jobs" Kutcher may be made up to look and walk like Jobs, but I never feel like I am getting into the head of Steve Jobs.
What does this film do well? The first half of it captures the look and feel of early home computing in a totally realistic way - the kind of people who were involved, the way that they dressed, what early homemade personal computers in the 1970s looked like. What did they look like? It was like the first cars when they were called "horseless carriages" because that's what people AND the inventors understood as the old paradigm. The horse was being replaced with an engine and the rest of the car looked like carriages always had looked. So the earliest computers had switches and lights and sat in unattractive blue boxes that engineers thought were great, but the average person had no idea what to do with such a thing and didn't want one.
What did this film do poorly? I'd say Steve Wozniak is presented as a mere shadow of himself here. You never see the camaraderie or dynamic between himself and Jobs. The old Home Brew Club looked up to Wozniak, and when he presents the first "Apple" computer to them they just look bored and Woz looks scared.
Finally I come to Ashton Kutcher. Ashton Kutcher's problem is that he did one of his earliest roles so well and so long - that of mega screw up Kelso in the long running TV comedy "That 70's Show". He did it so well in fact that I ALWAYS see Kelso whenever I see Kutcher, no matter how well he is performing. In this film I kept waiting for his 70's Show girlfriend, alpha female attack dog Jackie, to come jumping out of a dark corner and start yelling at him and tell him what a screw up he is. Kutcher can't help this. I call it "Norman Bates Syndrome" - the same thing that happened to Anthony Perkins. No matter what role Anthony Perkins took after Psycho, no matter how well he did it, he was always Norman Bates. You just kept waiting for him to hit somebody over the head and start preparing the body to add to his collection of stuffed animals/people.
This is not a terrible film on Jobs. Nobody does a bad job, and it is interesting from a history of personal computing perspective. I'd say see this one for the history, and watch the Fassbender rendition in "Steve Jobs" to get a feel for the essence of the man, who will always remain somewhat of an enigma.
