Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 15 May

BlackBerry (Johnson, 2023)

The current trend for films about nostalgic brands and products is one that has largely passed me by.

As a professional, I should probably not admit that I haven’t even seen Tetris, Flamin’ Hot, Air or the new Jerry Seinfeld film about Pop-Tarts, Unfrosted.

Last year I did review The Beanie Bubble (“… there is much fun to be had at the expense of the fashion and the culture as well as the corporate excess that often follows when the marketing of cheap Chinese-made plastic tat makes you a billionaire”) and that film is pretty close in tone to Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry.

Covering a similar era (the 90s to the early 2000s), and with a comparably extravagant approach to the truth, BlackBerry is the story of RIM, the plucky little Canadian technology startup that invented the modern smartphone but was brought down by pride and hubris.

The most nominated film ever in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards – due to be handed out in a couple of weeks – it’s the Canadian-ness that is part of this film’s appeal. There’s something about the plucky underdog that makes the RIM story, and the unlikely characters at its centre, easy to get behind.

Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (co-writer and director Matt Johnson) were best friends from grade school. In the 90s they built a small tech startup specialising in building these new fangled things called modems that allowed people to get on to the internet from their homes.

The dream, even then, was to have a device that you could carry around that could also get online but mobile communications were controlled by cellular providers who took great care to protect their networks, as well as their minute-by-minute revenues.

Lazaridis developed a device that could send and receive email without overloading those mobile networks, changing the game entirely. That device became BlackBerry, and with the aggressive (to say the least) support of early investor and co-CEO Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), it went on to become a technological and cultural phenomenon.

I don’t recall BlackBerry being that big a deal here in New Zealand – something to do with our tiny market and the fact that their servers were in Waterloo, Canada, straining to keep the whole thing afloat. So, I didn’t own one but was an early adopter of many competing devices during this period, including an early PalmPilot and a beautiful but fundamentally useless personal organiser called an iPaq PocketPC.

The film brings that era flooding back. The endorphin rush of being able to communicate instantly with almost anyone around the world, and the way it encouraged us to check out of real-life situations and stare at our phones instead.

RIM appears to have run almost entirely on adrenaline and testosterone. There’s one notable shot where the blowhard new COO (played by legend Michael Ironside) tells a room full of engineers that they have very small penises and the camera settles on the discomfited face of the one woman on the team.

Johnson previously wrote, directed and starred in my favourite ‘fake moon landings’ film, Operation Avalanche, which played in the 2016 New Zealand International Film Festival, and the style here is similar to mockumentary but without the conceit of a fake camera crew. Visuals are largely handheld and shot through windows into internal offices, through a crowd of faces at a boardroom table, or from a distance across dreary diners.

It’s as if someone is gathering evidence for these guys’ inevitable comeuppance.

By the way, it’s not all that much of a morality tale. All three of the RIM leaders at the centre of the story are still among the richest people in Canada, if not the world, and BlackBerry, the company, still has revenues of over US$500m a year (although zero remaining cultural capital).

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Where to watch BlackBerry