‘The Dropout’ Review: The Fall of the ‘Female Steve Jobs’

Hulu’s TV series “The Dropout‎” based on real events has finally been launched recently. The story of “The Dropout‎” is a big news that almost everyone knows, and the cast is extremely strong. It is a relatively heavy work recently.

“The Dropout‎” tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos, once known as the “Female Jobs”.

Theranos is a start-up that used a completely impossible technology as a selling point, coaxed a lot of Silicon Valley investors to invest, and ended up losing everything.

Stanford University student Elizabeth Holmes “invented” a portable blood test device. Although the teacher asserted that this technology is impossible to achieve in reality, she still dropped out of school and founded Theranos company, wanting to promote the technology on a large scale.

Elizabeth first raised $6 million from her parents and friends, and when it was about to burn through the money, Theranos finally built a prototype that didn’t actually work out. Elizabeth persuaded Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investor Don Lucas to get in touch with the Swiss pharmaceutical company and get a second round of $165 million in financing.

Later, under the leadership of heavyweights such as Larry Ellison and Don Lucas, many celebrities in the industry began to invest in Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes became a rising star in Silicon Valley, and Theranos’ blood-testing machines were used generation after generation, even making their way into pharmacies, and nearly getting a contract with the U.S. Army, but its technology never actually worked out.

Many of the characters in “The Dropout‎” are instantly recognizable because I’ve read the best-selling Theranos book, Bad Blood.

But unlike the book’s spectator’s perspective, “The Dropout‎” does more digging into the character of Elizabeth Holmes.

Elizabeth Holmes was born in a relatively wealthy middle-class family. Her ancestors used to be very wealthy. In her generation, her father worked in Enron and her mother was a housewife. The family lived a typical upper middle class life.

She was withdrawn from an early age, but extremely strong. After the Enron scandal broke out of her father’s unemployment, Elizabeth Holmes’ ambition to become a “billionaire” became more than everything.

It can be said that she planned the life she thought she should have in her mind, and then completely refused to accept the reality, just as she always insisted that no matter how many professionals told her that Theranos technology was not feasible, she still felt that as long as she worked hard enough Just do it.

The formation of many of the traits Elizabeth Holmes became known later was described in “The Dropout‎”.

She has never been slovenly, in stark contrast to the meticulous middle-class housewife’s mother.

But then everyone’s impression of her is always a high-neck black sweater like Jobs.

She was just an ordinary girl, but one day she began to lower her voice and slowly lose her gender identity.

From a loner who was not very good at dealing with people since he was a child, he slowly turned into a fraud master who knew how to manipulate the Silicon Valley bigwigs…

How did her partner and boyfriend Sunny, who has been inseparable all along, got into this story…

When I watched the first two episodes, I had the illusion that I was watching a successful startup story, but as Elizabeth Holmes began to cheat for the first time, the atmosphere of the whole drama became more and more “weird”.

Amanda Seyfried’s performance is very good, staring at her big eyes, the audience can clearly feel that this person is not very “normal”, but it is not abnormal like a “neuropathy”, or it is “not right” that people can’t tell.

In fact, it is still difficult to make interesting TV dramas or movies for this kind of story that has realistic prototypes and happened in contemporary times.

On the one hand, everyone may be familiar with the story, and even if there is a joke, it is impossible to make up. On the one hand, this kind of headline news of the year may not attract much attention after a few years.

Therefore, for the audience who are familiar with this story, the point of interest is not to see how the story develops, but to watch what has long been familiar in the brain become the actual image that appears in front of them.

In the case of “The Dropout‎,” it was kind of weird to watch a bunch of familiar actors play roles that were doomed to tragedy.

Just like in reality, many people were extremely excited when they first came to Theranos, thinking that they had joined something amazing that could change the world, that they could make history and make a lot of money. How could they know that they were only part of an imagination. In the end, the spirit is destroyed, the moral concept is completely subverted, the body and mind are exhausted and even the hope of life is completely lost.

What “The Dropout‎” shows is how a tiny, seemingly harmless lie has grown little by little, becoming a big deception that shocked the world.

And how a dream without foundation will eventually be broken.

Because the story itself is dramatic enough, it really doesn’t need to make up new things, it is enough to have content, and it is also worth watching for this cast.

Related Post: “The Dropout” brings more people to know how Elizabeth Holmes deceived so many people.