I know I’ve dunked on biopic films being unoriginal, however I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed the recent trend of films made about brands. ‘Air’ the story of Michael Jordan’s Air Jordans was superb. The GameStop stock squeeze movie named ‘Dumb Money’ was pretty entertaining despite a few flaws. And the new ‘Blackberry’ movie was more than brilliant.
‘Blackberry’ featured two of my favorite yet underrated actors: Glenn Howerton (Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and Matthew Johnson (Nirvana the Band the Show). It was great seeing these guys out of their usual roles, and they performed amazingly. The movie’s premise was simply about how the Blackberry phone and the company Research In Motion was founded and eventually fell from grace.
The film had this great theme throughout that showed the conflict between different workplace styles. It presented the relaxed fun creative type pinned against the aggressive authoritarian businessman. This formed a codependent relationship between the two, where one would inevitably fail without the other. However, when they began to swap positions with one another it caused complete chaos. We all have roles in this world, and being part of a business structure can magnify these categories.
The other interesting thing to analyze was the similar situation between Blackberry and Apple. Blackberry was the most popular phone in the United States, yet they are now lost to time – becoming a footnote in the history of technology. The Apple iPhone was also the most popular phone at one point, yet have dialed back to becoming merely just another product amongst thousands. In a hundred years time we will all be using microchips inserted into our brains from a Swahili based company and laughing about the cavemen that use to play on touch screen technology named after a fruit.
One of my favorite websites is History vs Hollywood as they use in depth research and sources to explain the accuracies of films that claim to be true. They have a long list of the depictions and events relating to Blackberry that were either exaggerated or outright fiction. This site however reaches the same conclusion as I do; these false depictions were relatively minor in the scheme of things. They were also forgivable because they made the movie more entertaining or were symbolic representations.
I don’t really have any negative critiques for this movie worth mentioning. It’s a pretty universal film that everyone can enjoy. And if you get bored you can just stare at your Blackberry phone instead.
