SkyShowtime has this controversial documentary about the life of the genius

The night Steve Jobs died, I had more notifications, missed calls, and messages on my iPhone than ever before. Right in that moment, I knew the death of a character like him would leave beyond the world of technology: A lot of the ads I had on my phone were from people or media that didn’t talk about Apple.

All fans of the brand have our story from back then, like every event that affects our lives – no matter the extent. And similar things happened in the following days all over the world, beyond the little world: People, even those who didn’t know all this, wanted to know the story behind it.

Meet (parts of) Steve Jobs

With the arrival of SkyShowtime in Spain, we have the opportunity to see one of the most controversial documentaries about jobs made to date. Director, Alex Gibney is a well-known filmmaker who has also produced well-known documentaries such as “Going Clear” about the Church of Scientology.

Gibney has also worked on other projects on the Wikileaks leaks, the Lance Armstrong cyclist scandal, and the popular The Inventor about Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud as CEO of Theranos, among others. He only announced that a few days ago his next documentary will be nothing more and nothing less than about Elon Musk. As you can see, he repeatedly takes up current controversial topics in his works, thanks him for the harshness of the stories, but occasionally also criticizes the excess of sensationalism.

With “Steve Jobs, the man in the machine”, the director takes us on a secret walk through the life of the popular Apple CEO from almost his birth to his death – through conversations and statements from people who worked or lived with him those crazy years

A nervous Jobs, an enlightened Jobs

Footage begins with Steve Jobs preparing for an interview in the Macintosh era. An unusual job now: nervous, clumsy, wanting to go to the toilet to throw up directly from the nerves. years later, The scenarios would be their natural environment. Gibney tries to answer an interesting question with the tape: “It wasn’t Lennon or Marin Luther King. Who was the man who turned the world into a global track?

To do this is to deconstruct the myth to its most basic personal elements: to focus only on perhaps the most controversial part, in my opinion, the confrontations, the problems. Jobs was probably a guy abominable with whom to work, but very little is said in the documentation by what he got in a hostile environmentflat and dominated by large corporations.

All of this is explained in one of the most interesting parts of the documentary: the statements of his mentor, a monk named Kobun Chino Otogawawith whom Jobs walked and drank tea late in the morning in Los Altos, California. “I am enlightened to do something great. I want you to make me a monk” – the most selfish Jobs confessed to perhaps the most humble person in the whole valley.

“If you think you’re so sublime, bring me proof” Kobun replied. And Jobs brought it to him: one of the main motherboards of the Lisa project. “I will change the world with this”. Is very curious about these conversations from the mouths of those who were so close to him: we profiled him as crazy, eccentric, but with him everything seemed possible. Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his first daughter – Lisa – puts it into perspective very well on the tape: “He was confident and clumsy at the same time.”

Travel to the end of the world to find the soul of the product

Bob Belleville, Technical Director at Macintosh He traveled to Japan with Jobs himself to be inspired by the beauty of Japanese minimalism and its logical and simple way of creating forms. Belleville’s life was changed by the Macintosh: he lost his wife and his lifestyle at the time, but he still remembered that time fondly: “These three years were so incredible that I studied like it was ten. The fact is that Steve Jobs seemed to have learned centuries more.”

The documentation It falls short because in two hours he doesn’t want to talk about what Jobs has achieved, but about his problems. I miss more moments from the genesis of the Macintosh, the interaction at the Homebrew Club where he struggled to bring computers into everyday life, the struggles over technologies no one thought were worth anything and with which he eventually built a usable product.

He also makes the mistake of comparing Apple to a traditional company and its processes in the mid-80s, and his youngest team from the last years of his life is also not given a voice, the regy his clear and concise vision of the futurethe DNA with which he knew how to impregnate this new Apple almost as amends for his past mistakes and which is still valid in the company today.

Gibney’s work is too badly subtitledwith sentences that often don’t make the slightest sense and disconnect us from the story: I advise you to focus on the original audio commentary even if you don’t know much English – it can be perfectly understood even from the context.

However, if you are a new SkyShowtime subscriber, I recommend you try it and feed something else with what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important figures in the world of technology in recent years. The documentary is very well filmed and the story arc has very good audiovisual support from the period. If you are a tech enthusiast you will surely appreciate the trip to California – and all that happened there.

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