BlackBerry: Comedy on smartphone's rise delights Berlin film fest
"BlackBerry", a King Kong vs. Godzilla tale of the first smartphones, premiered to cheers at the Berlin film festival on Friday, exploring geek culture, toxic masculinity and the birth of gadget addiction.
The rollicking two-hour movie by Canadian actor and filmmaker Matt Johnson tells the true story of the heady rise and calamitous fall of one of the great inventions on the cusp of the new millennium.
Research In Motion (RIM), based in Waterloo, Ontario, developed the BlackBerry, the first successful mobile phone with built-in internet access and a thumb-operated keyboard.
It soon left millions of consumers, famously including Barack Obama, hopelessly hooked, earning it the nickname CrackBerry.
The revolutionary handset would pave the way for Apple's iPhone, which ultimately cannibalised it and drove RIM from the market amid an insider trading probe against the Canadian executives.
- 'Sci-fi culture' -
The film presents RIM as a band of nerdy brothers -- spectacularly gifted misfits who find themselves becoming the titans of a new age.
"The early Internet was mostly all forums talking about 'Star Trek'," Johnson told reporters in Berlin.
He said he wanted to explore how that world of fandom gave rise to some of the greatest scientific leaps of our lifetime.
"The people who are going to be real vanguards of technology are also going to be people who are very interested in nerdy sci-fi culture and I saw that as really fertile ground," he said.
"They watch 'Star Trek' and they go, 'oh man, it'd be cool if we had that'. We really are living in the world that we inherited from these young technologists and they built it based on the movies they were watching."
Johnson and Jay Baruchel ("How to Train Your Dragon")
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