Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, the thing people used before Steve Jobs gave the world the seminal iPhone, gets the “Social Network” treatment in Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton’s new movie.
Now, it’s a relic. An also-ran. Or, as one character puts it in BlackBerry, a new movie about the early smartphone empire’s rise and fall, it’s merely “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.” But as this fresh, thoughtful comedy makes plain, BlackBerry is more than just a bleak cautionary tale. It’s a story of how tech culture, as we know it today, took root, bloomed, and died on the vine.
Loosely based on the 2016 book Losing the Signal, BlackBerry seems at first blush like a familiar, Social Network-style drama of a company’s explosive rise…
BlackBerry, the company, may have grown too fast, lost its pluck. But BlackBerry, the movie, is a model of how to make something at scale, without having to do the same. BlackBerry plays like the comedy equivalent of the industrious dorks pulling an all-nighter in the garage, attempting to reengineer the world in their image.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in 2015 when the book was being promoted:
We can just imagine DCW’s half-CEOs staring blankly at each other with mouths agape hoping for a answer that never came. Amateur Hour, indeed.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post New movie ‘BlackBerry’ explores how Research In Motion lost the signal appeared first on MacDailyNews.
