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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Turner Home Ent
Salesrank: 8069
Released: August 30, 2005 |
| Our Price: $15.59 |
| Used Price: $10.99 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
The revolution came when we weren't looking. It happened in a garage. In a dorm room. In countless hours of effort, imagining and intrigue. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates were changing the way the world works, lives and communicates. The event-packed saga of the quirky visionaries who jump-started the future unfolds with exhilarating, cutting-edge style in Pirates of Silicon Valley. Noah Wyle (ER) portrays Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall (The Dead Zone) portrays Gates in this chronicle of the fierce and often humorous battle to rule the fledgling personal computer empire. "The story is almost Shakespearean... it's a tale of lust, greed, ambition, love and hate," writer/director Martyn Burke reflects. And it's a success story unlike any other.
Description of Pirates of Silicon Valley:
This dramatization of the tangled history of Apple Computer and Microsoft, based on a book by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, 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
Pirates of Silicon Valley Reviews:
Travesty 
2009-12-26 - One would think a film based on computer engineers would at least try to portray their conversation and speech patterns with some semblance of verisimilitude. But this sloppy and inept film has all the young software engineers acting like frat presidents. The director seems to have based his portrayal of engineers on bad Hollywood movies, not on interviewing real ones. There's none of the intensity and precision of thought that would have characterized people like Wozniak and Gates when they were in college.
Unfortunately for the film-makers' attempts to rewrite history by making Wozniak and Gates seem like sitcom stereotypes (Allen is watchable, unlike the other two), their interviews from those periods are widely available, for example on youtube.
I have no idea why Hollywood has so much difficulty portraying computer engineers realistically. Maybe Primer comes closest in some respects, as well as parts of Apollo 13. But even if they can't get every detail right, why do they have to overact so much? Can't they be bad and inaccurate with a bit less noise, facial contortions, and implausible outbursts? I suppose it's a problem with everyone in Hollywood, the overacting and overemoting, but since this movie is supposed to recreate actual events whose characters are well-known, one would hope they would give the emoting a rest just this once.
Good start for Gates & Jobs research 
2009-04-04 - I originally borrowed this documentary to show in my high school economics class. I wanted to fill in the gaps on how Microsoft & Apple were started & to clarify what I believed Gates has taken from Jobs. I was not only enlightened on that, but also on all the various other ways these two people were able to take things that existed & create an incredible enterprise in personal computers, and still do. Great for anyone wanting to know just how they did it.
I Love Nerds
2009-03-18 - A superhero story for nerds...where would we all be if these guys had never existed or never had the confident nerve to make personal computers a reality...now a necessity?! The story, tho told like a Lifetime movie event, is fascinating. Ya gotta respect these guys...tho you really won't like a few of them.
What it was about
2009-03-04 - In the end, most people know who Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are. If you're into computers or watch the news it is kinda hard not to know. What I liked the most about this movie is the underlining story of Steve Wozniak. In the end both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are businessmen. The person who is mostly responsible for today's computers is Steve Wozniak. Gates and Jobs only marketed products made by other people like The Woz as he was called.
At times the acting in this movie is a little over the top and the story is exaggerated from what rely happened. But everything that is in this movie did happen just not to the domination level in this movie.
If your a geek like me then you will love this movie
2008-11-09 - I loved this movie because it gives the Hollywood treatment to a computer geek fairy tale. Good movie, great portrayals, really helps you to understand the Apple/Microsoft/IBM/Xerox dynamic.
