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STUDIO: Warner Home Video
MSRP: $19.98
RATED: Unrated
RUNNING TIME: 97 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES: DVD-exclusive introduction by Noah Wyle
The Pitch
"It’s just like Pirates of the Caribbean except Bill Gates isn’t cursed and Steve Jobs doesn’t wear a corset."
The Humans
Noah Wyle, Anthony Michael Hall, Joey Slotnick and a bunch of Hollywood people playing a bunch of computer people.
It was 35 awkward minutes before Jobs realized he was in fact addressing the National Gay Pride Fruit Lovers’ Association.
The Nutshell
Pirates is about the two men most directly responsible for starting the ongoing personal computer revolution and making enough money to buy the planet along the way – Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of some small startup called Microsoft. Noah Wyle plays Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall is Lord Bill as they form their respective companies from the ground up and collaborate and later compete against each other. Jobs is a visionary businessman who knows how to get the word out about the personal computer, which is mostly the creation of his much more talented but socially inept friend, Steve Wozniak (Slotnick). He’s into utilizing the advantage of coming out of nowhere to challenge IBM, which he considers to be a bloated dinosaur that’s ready to be made extinct.
"Shit! Somebody already got the Graboid!"
It’s not long before Jobs has turned Apple into the hottest thing in the computer world in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. But his incessant drive for perfection and abusively demanding nature start to make him a hated man within his own company and his pitting of his two business divisions – Apple II and Macintosh – against each other divides his employees. On a personal note, Jobs also continually shuns his daughter, the namesake for his first major computer, Lisa.
The high point of the movie was definitely the Katma Tui blowjob scene…
On the flipside, Hall portrays Bill Gates as a calculating and obsessively competitive opportunist who is the VHS to Jobs’ Beta. Together with Paul Allen, Gates founds Microsoft, but doesn’t have anywhere near the early success that Jobs and Wozniak have. However, by having Allen buy an operating system from an old college mate and retooling it and then selling it to IBM as DOS, Gates is able to quickly build Microsoft into a profitable software company. When he sees the revolutionary Lisa computer that utilizes a device called a mouse and interactive software that Apple creates (which Jobs and crew filched from Xerox), he worms his way into business with Apple and ultimately does the same to them, turning Microsoft into the computer company in the world and Gates the richest man on the planet.
Don’t know what was worse, the computer viruses or the termites.
The Package
This disc is far from a collector’s edition as this is a barebones offering with a DVD-exclusive introduction by Noah Wyle as the only main feature, save a couple of trailers. The look of the DVD is about as good as it was when it premiered on TV and is likewise in TV-screen format. The sound seemed to also be uneven as I’d have to continually adjust when the dialogue was low one minute and then some music would come on and rattle the windows. The cover art is just as exciting as Bill Gates himself.
Goddamned Office Assistants…
The Lowdown
I’ve watched Wyle on ER for 11 years, and in some cases, Jobs seems nothing more than John Carter as a huge prick. Overall Wyle did pull off the part off, even if he didn’t manage to stand out in the role. Hall, however, shines as Gates, the creepy little nerd who’s bound and determined to bring about a computer revolution…with himself as the binary Lenin. Writer/director Martyn Burke has a good eye and paces the story nicely, and throws in a few asides where certain of the characters literally step out of the story momentarily to give their two cents on the action. Burke utilizes this only a few times and it deftly adds a little something extra without being too much of an overused gimmick. And a story that might not seem to be that interesting actually is; but I can’t imagine that anyone’s going to be running out to buy this flick unless they’re die-hard Mac users who want to see Bill Gates vilified and enjoy it over and over. They’re certainly not going to be getting this disc for the extras.
This scene was actually normal, I was just on X when I watched it…