New Steve Jobs Trailer Takes the Focus Beyond Apple

A new trailer for the upcoming Steve Jobs film written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender as Jobs released on Wednesday and it looks promising especially when you compare it to the Ashton Kutcher film that released in 2013.

The film - which is releasing on October 9, 2015 - seems to span a pretty large part of Jobs' life, going from the Macintosh to the iMac, and it's pretty amazing to see the hair and makeup work on Fassbender in this trailer. Over the course of the roughly two-and-a-half minute trailer, you can see him at different points in his life, and he really looks the part - even though he sort of looks like he's playing Christian Bale, not Steve Jobs, at least in a couple of the shots. Barring a couple of odd angles though, Fassbender looks great in the new trailer.

One thing about this trailer that makes it look promising is that unlike the 2013 movie, this one doesn't seem to be out to canonise Jobs as a modern saint; it's showing his difficult relationship with his family, and the trailer at least doesn't seem to try and justify it.

The problem with the 2013 film was that it largely places the conflicts that took place around Jobs as being a consequence of brilliance. That's not really fair to the people around Jobs though, and it was hard to watch a biography that tried to create a guilt-free vision of the man. But Sorkin, who also wrote the Social Network - the movie about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg - has shown that he knows how to make a protagonist that is interesting yet deeply flawed. With any luck, the new Fassbender movie will also paint a three-dimensional portrait of Jobs, instead of washing away his sins.

In fact, while there weren't any exact parallels, the trailer showed enough beats to suggest that it is similar in tone to The Social Network. Jobs' rise and fall, and his subsequent return to success all follow a similar progression, particularly as the trailer suggests that the film will move between the public and the personal space connecting the two. There will probably be a lot of focus on Jobs beyond Apple, with the trailer dedicating scenes to Jobs arguing with Steve Wozniak, and arguing with people about his daughter Lisa.

Overall, it's a promising trailer, and we're certainly looking forward to this movie, but if you're less interested in Jobs and more interested in Apple, then there's another film that you really need to see. That's a movie called Pirates of the Silicon Valley, which released in 1999, starring Noah Wylie as Jobs, and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. The film traces the journey of Gates and Jobs as they start Apple and Microsoft, and it's still one of the most entertaining and engaging takes on two of the most powerful companies in the world.