Seeing the new film "Blackberry" was a trip down memory and wireless history lane. As an industry analyst, I worked with RIM and all of the pioneering smartphone companies. I was also a VP at Verizon at a critical time depicted in the film – when the Blackberry was peaking and when the iPhone was first introduced in early 2007. So it was also interesting to see how accurately real events are portrayed.
First off, let me just say that this is a really entertaining movie. Even non-techies will find it both fun and enlightening. The style I’d say is a blend of "Social Network"/"Moneyball"/"Air" with the edge and sassiness of the "Big Short." And it’s a better film, in my view, than the also entertaining but more flawed "Air," the recent Affleck-Damon flick about Nike.
This is not the first film about the birth of the smartphone era. There were two mainstream feature films about Steve Jobs, and an excellent documentary about the rise and fall of General Magic (remember them?).
Most of "Blackberry" is focused on the early days of Research in Motion (RIM), when Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin started the company and pioneered the technology that enabled a device to send data over the then narrowband wireless networks. This part of the film is both detailed and quite accurate. Although the requisite nerds-in-a-lab-in-Waterloo scenes had more of a late 1970s/early 1980s look than the mid-1990s to early aughts timeframe that was being depicted.
The pivotal moment in the film is when Jim Balsillie is brought in as co-CEO to be the deals and marketing guy. Balsillie was certainly a smooth-talking, hard-charging exec. But his swagger and style, while fun to watch, is overdone in the film, with F-bombs being dropped with Logan Roy-esque frequency. In a fun bit of insider irony, Glen Howerton’s Balsillie has a striking resemblance to longtime AT&T exec and current CEO John Stankey.
Another aside is that the bombastic and boorish office behavior of both Balsillie and COO Charles Purdy must surely be exaggerated. It’s Canada, after all! If this was today, they would have been canceled in a nanosecond.
And here’s a curiosity in terms of the major execs that are portrayed. Most of the principals, from the RIM execs to Palm CEO Carl Yankowski (a very unflattering portrait) and AT&T CEO Stan Sigman represent the actual people at the time. However, in the several brief scenes of meetings with Bell Atlantic-and-then-Verizon execs, the main guy who gets lines is someone named John Hoffman, whom I don’t recall. The other numerous Verizon folks around the long conference table (shown to be in New York City when it was actually in New Jersey) were nameless and faceless. None of the pivotal Verizon executives from this time of Peak Verizon, such as CEO Denny Strigl, CTO Dick Lynch, CMO John Stratton, or key device guy, Rich Meigh, are mentioned.
The film loses some of its authenticity in the final scenes. Certainly the day the iPhone was introduced was a pivotal moment for Blackberry and was Day One of its gradual decline.
One major inaccuracy is that the introduction of the App Store is shown in the film to occur at around the same time as the initial iPhone, though in fact the App Store wasn’t launched until a year later, in conjunction with the iPhone 3G, which is when iPhone sales really started to take off. Also, AT&T’s three-year iPhone exclusivity is never specifically mentioned. Nor is Verizon’s courting of the nascent Android, which ended up being another critical nail in the Blackberry coffin. Also, in the scenes depicting Palm, the Treo – an innovative and competitive device for a few pre-iPhone years – is never mentioned, or shown.
There’s also a mega-scene toward the end of the film that stretches reality. In just one day, Balsillie has a terrible meeting with Verizon, then supposedly flies to New York to do his NHL deal (landing a private plane at JFK, though most N.Y.-bound private jets go to Teterboro), and then hops to Atlanta to run Stan Sigman down just as he’s headed off for a family vacation. Umm, probably didn’t happen that way. It’s as if director Matt Johnson was told, "OK, buddy, time to wrap this up."
Overall, I give "Blackberry" three and a half stars. Anyone who’s been in the industry for a while will find it to be a really fun romp, and a great look back at the era of peak device innovation in wireless. Everyone else will find it to be an informative and entertaining couple of hours.
Mark Lowenstein, a leading industry analyst, consultant, and commentator, is managing director of Mobile Ecosystem. Click here to subscribe to his free Lens on Wireless monthly newsletter, or follow him on Twitter at @marklowenstein.
Industry Voices are opinion columns written by outside contributors—often industry experts or analysts—who are invited to the conversation by FierceWireless staff. They do not necessarily represent the opinions of FierceWireless.