Berlin Film Festival: “BlackBerry”, the rise and fall of a worldwide phenomenon
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The history of the BlackBerry in competition at the Berlinale: among the first films in the running for the Golden Bear there is a film centered on the genesis, the worldwide success and finally the serious failure of the famous portable device.
Simply titled “BlackBerry”, this Canadian film directed by Matt Johnson describes the meeting between the brilliant engineer Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, a businessman with a strongly commercial attitude: by joining forces they created and sold a real worldwide phenomenon, capable of influencing much of the subsequent technology.
The BlackBerry changed the way we work and communicate but, after the huge climb, the first problems also arrived: the competition from other smartphones that were emerging (starting from the iPhone, explicitly mentioned during the film), as well as a series of serious distractions, possible wrongdoing and managerial confusion which, all together, led to the abrupt end of one of the most successful brands in the history of technology.
Inspired by the novel “Losing the Signal” by Jacquie Mcnish, Matt Johnson has created a film centered on the meteoric rise and catastrophic disappearance of the BlackBerry. From this starting point, a film is developed that deals with the unbridled race for technological advances, recounting characters who end up losing their soul in order to achieve success.
The films of the second day of the Berlinale
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Refer to “The Social Network”
The excellent “The Social Network”, centered on the birth of Facebook, can easily come to mind, but, compared to the rigorous and precise style of David Fincher, Matt Johnson opts instead for the use of handheld cameras and for a semi-documentary look on the story: in fact, there are also archive materials, taken from news reports and videos of the time, which intersperse a narration that proceeds at a good pace from beginning to end. The aesthetic rendering of the film is not very good and the narration has excessively predictable, but overall it is a product that you look at with pleasure.
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