The film recreates a bit of the "a beginning is a very delicate time" rinky-dinkiness of Making A Big Thing Start when you have almost no resources to fund it (or pay for a decent place to sleep); fairly standard biopic stuff, but presented efficiently and willing to reenact pretty concrete details, like the set of the famous Apple "1984" commercial. (There's a decent Ridley Scott doppelgänger for that scene, too.) The film focuses more on Jobs than Gates, and more on Jobs's motivation and philosophy than Gates's, whose thoughts tend to be presented more in passing, in fragments. And since Apple was more involved in hardware (easy to show! You can have props!) and Microsoft was more involved in software, the hardware is pictured more often. There are ways to visualize and dramatize how software runs; this film only sort of shows that. And since it's a 1999 telefilm, the filmmakers knew there was more story they could never show or even anticipate. Pirates of Silicon Valley runs into that frequent biopic problem of mainly just stopping, not climaxing; the film basically just ends. A way around that (I can act like a movie executive! "Here's the film I would've made...") would've been to hint at how much more story was certainly going to happen, post-2000, with computer hardware and software ever more integrated into our lives and Steve Jobs (even after his 2011 death) and Bill Gates remaining influential in that and other parts of our lives. "The Computer Adventure Is Just Beginning," to paraphrase Star Trek...
And now I wonder how I would've reacted to Steve Jobs had I ever met him, how I'd react if I ever do meet Bill Gates. My hunch? I might possibly get along with Gates. Jobs, I'm not sure I would have. Don't know if I'd've gotten the charming, philosophical side of him or the jerk side of him. Won't ever find out now with Jobs gone; meanwhile, who knows, maybe I'll run into Gates somewhere and sometime in this odd world. And at least Gates seems capable of being goofy. I have real trouble picturing Jobs being goofy.
This also makes me want to read Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography. I want to know more. It's still (partly) his world I'm living in, after all.
