Watch movies outside the country with secure Aeroshield Smart DNS
In the early 2000s, before the first iPhone revealed itself to the world and shattered the communication status quo, it was the Blackberry that reigned supreme. The world’s first actual smartphone, the device was especially the go-to for all manner of business folk, considered very secure and able to handle various tasks like email, text, web browsing, and internet faxing, all revolutionary at the time. The phone brand cultivated its own unique culture that thrived until its inevitable downfall against the touchscreen smartphone boom, and now its entire story is coming to the big screen. Per a report from Collider, the trailer for a new docudrama titled Blackberry has officially dropped, giving audiences a firsthand look at one of the most fascinating stories in the tech industry.
Per its official tagline, Blackberry is a documentary drama that chronicles the “meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone”. Based on the original book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry, the film first premiered to the world at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, receiving immense praise from critics as it traveled the festival circuit, landing this past week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Matt Johnson helms the film as director and co-writer alongside Matthew Miller, whom both worked together on other projects such as Operation Avalanche (2016) and Nirvana the Band the Show (2017). Miller co-produced the film alongside Fraser Ash, Niv Fichman, and Kevin Kirkst. Starring in the documentary are Johnson himself as Douglas Fregin, Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Blackberry, Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, former chair of tech company Research in Motion, and Cary Elwes as Carl Yankowski, the CEO of Palm Inc.
Where It All Optimistically Started and Then Tragically Crashed
The trailer opens with a far younger Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) pitching their newest idea for mobile devices that would revolutionize personal communication going into the new century. Claiming that there’s a free wireless internet signal all across the country that no one’s learned how to use yet, they suggest bringing email service and subsequently the internet from the desktop computer to the mobile phone. The idea is in fact pure brilliance, but both Lazaridis and Fregin have no idea how to brand it. Cutthroat salesman Jim Balsillie realizes the untouched potential and demands a staggering fifty percent of their company in exchange for his marketing prowess, to which Lazardis agrees.
Balsillie helps the duo launch their new smartphone company BlackBerry, which manages to dominate the mobile phone industry a few years before tech giants Apple and Google enter the space. Growing so big so fast, the path of greed starts to affect Lazaridis’ personal relationships and all those who trusted him. With Balsillie’s hard, capitalistic focus on insane profits over quality, and flooding the servers with far more phones than they can currently handle, the company begins to falter in its vision and ability to innovate, particularly when Steve Jobs formally introduces the first touchscreen smartphone. It all begins the downward spiral that ultimately leads to BlackBerry becoming obsolete and swallowed up by stronger companies.
BlackBerry comes to theaters everywhere on May 12. The trailer can be viewed below.
.