SXSW FILM REVIEW: The rise and fall of the original smartphone as a tragic satire in BLACKBERRY.
Never underestimate the power of a great haircut to remove the immediate recognizability of an actor.
In many ways, this is a conventional rise-and-fall tale of a company that had it all and was destroyed by the hubris of the very people who made that success possible. In this case, it's Research In Motion, a pager company in Waterloo, Ontario, that created the smartphone market, and went from stinky stacks of unsold modems to multi-billion-dollar stock value and must-have mystique, and finally into electronic obscurity across 17 volatile, fascinating, years.The Office.
Inevitably, Johnson has to truncate the history a little. Tech historians make take issue with the presentation of the iPhone, rather than the Nokia Lumia as the first real competitor, and Balsillie's furious backroom war with the NHL gets boiled down to a couple of meetings. But in that boil down, Johnson not only gets the story across, but finds new, fascinating narrative tricks.
Johnson also avoids simple heroics: this is a merciless world, he notes, where friendships and profits are interwoven. Across time, the"we're all in this together" mentality of the seed-funding days, of overtime in maybe-money equity, pizza and movie nights, metastasizes into eternal crunch culture and companies thinking they own your soul because you were foolish enough to believe in their product.
But Johnson isn't simply telling a story of a Canadian success and failure. Underneath it all is a very real feeling that this will happen again. And again. And again. And probably, right now.
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