Amazon.com video review:
This dramatization of the tangled history of Apple Computer and
Microsoft, based on a book by Paul Frieberger, hits enough of the right
notes to make its failures all the
more frustrating. The script follows the entwined paths of Apple's
Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates with a pointed sense of the
cultural divide between the hip, self-absorbed Apple cofounder and the
brilliant alpha geek behind Microsoft's eventual software empire,
contrasting the Mac's countercultural underpinnings with the PC's
more strait-laced origins. But Pirates of Silicon Valley
seemingly can't decide whether it wants to be a serious-minded history
of these key figures in the personal computer revolution or a trashy
wallow in the more ignoble foibles of its principals. As a result, it
falls short of exacting history while never achieving the guilty
pleasure it might have.
If Gates has become synonymous with corporate conquest at its most
striking, Pirates' interest lies more with Jobs, given a nervous
energy and flashes of adolescent selfishness by Noah Wyle,
who benefits from a reasonable physical resemblance to the Apple chief.
Eyewear and a comb-over do nearly as well for Anthony Michael Hall, who
also grafts some of Bill Gates's better-known mannerisms onto his
performance and renders Gates as a smart if socially maladroit
entrepreneur who, like Jobs, provides the ambition and business savvy to
exploit his partner's computing talents. There are a few fanciful
touches (Ballmer and Wozniak become Greek choruses, addressing the
viewer as they comment on the principals), but the story plays out in
straightforward fashion. It's tantalizing to consider how the Apple/PC
melodrama might have fared with an edgier, more openly
satirical script. --Sam Sutherland
