Watch: Steve Jobs movie opens to rave reviews in New York, Los Angeles

San Francisco: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs became renowned for conjuring a “reality distortion field” that made people believe whatever he wanted. If he were still around, it’s easy to imagine that Jobs would be summoning all his powers of persuasion to protect a legacy that’s getting muddied with each cinematic take on his fascinating life.

“Steve Jobs,” which opened Friday in New York and Los Angeles is the latest movie to examine a charismatic visionary who mesmerized the masses with his trendsetting gadgets while alienating his subordinates and friends with an almost-inhumane cruel streak. In a phased rollout, the film will go nationwide on October 23 and international in November.

It’s the second movie about a Silicon Valley icon written by Aaron Sorkin, who won an Academy Award in 2011 for “The Social Network,” a dramatization of the friends and enemies that Mark Zuckerberg made while building Facebook into an Internet power.

Click on this link to read the latest on Kate Winslet’s role in the movie.

Jobs’ supporters probably won’t be happy with Sorkin’s posthumous interpretation of Jobs either, even though previously released movies have drawn similar portraits depicting him as an acid-dropping hippie turned megalomaniacal genius who berated and betrayed people.

Steve Jobs ( 2015) is the most provocative and best acted of the bunch, spearheaded by Michael Fassbender, who stars as Jobs. The story unfolds in a much different format, but the overriding message is the same: Jobs was a tortured soul who tortured those around him while striving to design machines that were made better than he was.

The film, based loosely on a best-selling book by Jobs’ hand-picked biographer Walter Isaacson, unfolds in three acts that take place before three presentations orchestrated by Jobs: the 1984 debut of the Macintosh computer; a 1988 showcase for the NeXT computer; and the 1998 unveiling of the iMac.

None of the pre-event scenes or dialogue actually occurred, but the drama is designed to capture the relentless drive and haunting demons that made Jobs who he was. Director Danny Boyle describes the movie as a “heightened version of real life” while Sorkin calls it a “painting and not a photograph.”

The story is told through Jobs’ interactions with six central figures in his life: his former marketing chief, Joanna Hoffman; his former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan; Apple co-founder and friend Steve Wozniak; former Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld; former Apple CEO John Sculley; and Lisa, the daughter that Jobs refused to acknowledge for many years.

Wozniak (played by Seth Rogen) delivers two of the film’s pivotal lines when he tells Jobs, “Your products are better than you are,” and “You can be decent and gifted at the same time.”

Read the BBC News report here.

AP