Steve Jobs biopic: world premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2013, review The Sundance Film Festival "wrapped" at the weekend, with the announcement of this year's awards, and the world premiere of the eagerly awaited jOBS, a biopic about Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple. Speaking at the film's world premiere, festival director John Cooper promised Jobs would "speak to the creative spirit of our new world of technology." Expectations were high. Could this film paint a profound portrait of one of the most revered technologists in history? The movie opens in 2001, with Jobs unveiling his masterpiece, the iPod, to tumultuous applause. We then travel back to 1971, where he's a smelly, horny student at Reed College, Portland. An LSD trip reveals he was adopted. A journey to India begins a process of enlightenment, teaching Jobs the importance of simplicity. After a stint as a technician at Atari, he teams up with his buddy, engineering wiz Steve Wozniak, and they found Apple computers. Jobs has the inspired idea to combine a typewriter with a TV. Wozniak builds the Apple II computer, and the company takes off. After a bitter boardroom battle, Jobs loses his job, but returns, stronger than ever, with Apple teetering on the brink of insolvency. He redirects the company's design ethos, consolidates his power and sets Apple on the path that will eventually lead to the iPad and global domination. It's a heroic story, but Matthew Whiteley's episodic, superficial script makes an almighty mess of it. Early on, when Jobs dumps his pregnant girlfriend and then refuses to recognise his newly born daughter as his own, he is established as unlikeable. Yet while focusing on Jobs's professional rise and his brutally demanding working practices, Whiteley gives us no insight into Jobs's Buddhist beliefs, or his capacity for love and tenderness. Jobs's pivotal relationship with Wozniak is similarly under-explored, with "Woz" characterised as a clumsy, hairy geek. The film also suffers from heavy-handed dialogue and a lack of dramatic conflict. The enemies whom Jobs overcame are one-dimensional, and appear too fleetingly. We have to wait until after the 90-minute mark to hear the name of Bill Gates, at whom Jobs screams down the phone: "You psychopathic, unimaginative criminal! I will sue you until I'm taking 90 cents of every dollar you make! We never hear of or see Gates again. However, where the film completely falls down is in director Joshua Michael Stern's disastrous decision to cast Ashton Kutcher in the central role. "I knew I was throwing myself into a gauntlet of criticism," Kutcher said at the premiere, "and this became the most terrifying thing I have done in my life." His fears have been realised. The poverty of his skills as a serious actor is on full display. His diction is incoherent. He clumsily signposts every emotion he thinks his character should feel: smug smiles for triumph; exaggerated scowls for disgust; nail-biting for anxiety. Happily, there's hope ahead for a better cinematic retelling of Jobs's life: Aaron Sorkin, the writer of The Social Network, is planning his own film about Jobs. It will focus on three scenes, each filmed in real time, and set in the minutes leading up to one of Apple's major product launches. The Sundance festival officially closed with its awards ceremony. Ryan Coolger's Fruitvale won both the jury and audience awards for American drama. In the international drama competitions, Muel O's Jiseul won the jury prize and Sean Willis's Metro Manila won the audience prize. Of the documentaries, Steve Hoover's Blood Brother won jury and audience awards in the American category. In the international documentary section, Kalyanee Mam's A River Changes Course won the jury prize, and Jehane Noujaim's The Square won the audience award.