Blackberry (2023)
Directed by Matthew Johnson
Written by Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller
Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Cary Elwes, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside
Release Date May 12, 2023
Published?
Blackberry is a story of technology, hubris, and the ways in which the world has been brought together via technology but people remain, quite predictably, human. The story of the rise of the first trendy handheld communication device, Blackberry charts the astonishing growth and precipitous fall of a fad unlike anything before it. Blackberry became a staple of high class living in the early 2000s. The ubiquity of the Blackberry became a meme before memes were cool. No caricature of a businessman was complete without them holding a Blackberry.
How the Blackberry thus came and went as a phenomenon is a ripe subject for a movie. After all, how does something as ubiquitous and beloved become ancient and nearly forgotten in the span of just over a decade? It's hard to quantify, even less than 20 years after the Blackberry, how big the Blackberry got and how quickly it fell out of fashion. There are few phenomenon's quite like it. Perhaps a reasonable comparison for modern audiences might be Tiger King. The famed Netflix series was the hottest thing in the world and by the time it came for a sequel, people had already forgotten the people involved.
The Blackberry lasted longer as a product but as a pop culture staple, the comparison is pretty good. Both became afterthoughts quicker than anyone involved could have imagined. The Blackberry's remarkable fall has roots in the way modern IT has changed the landscape of innovation. Where in the early days of the industrial revolution the innovation life-cycle was decades, today, the innovation life cycle is measured in years. Things in today's IT world change so quickly that even beloved innovations can expect to be outmoded within three years.
There's a reason why we are on the 14th generation of the IPhone in the 16 years since it was introduced by Steve Jobs and his turtle neck. Technology is now a shark that must swim even when it sleeps. The Blackberry story was the trial balloon of modern technology. Innovators need to look no further than the 2002 introduction of The Blackberry and that same product's obsolescence a mere 5 years later when the IPhone crashed the market.
As charted in the movie, Blackberry, the writing was on the wall from the early days. Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), the brains of the operation, was always in over his head as his employees walked all over him and took advantage of his genial good nature and lack of social grace. It's no wonder now, with grave hindsight, that Lazaridis would fall victim to a hard charging snake like Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Lazaridis just wanted to make new, helpful technology, a noble pursuit. He needed a ballbuster like Balsillie to push him to deliver his best, and it worked, if only for a moment in the span of our new technological evolutionary cycle.
The casting here in Blackberry is rather brilliant. Jay Baruchel, known as a waif and a shrinking violet, when he isn't an obnoxious denizen of a Judd Apatow film, is just the kind of guy who would get run over by a big personality like that of Glen Howerton. The former star of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star has a loud and brash personality that befits a scruples free businessman chasing every dollar and imposing his will upon the geeks and nerds that exist under his weighty boot. The dynamic is familiar, a genius who doesn't want the hassle of leadership and a dictator who is hungry for power at all cost come together like halves of a whole.
Full length review at Geeks.Media
