BlackBerry

Technology matters here, but the most interesting part is not the device itself. It is watching how a small company built on talent, improvisation and enthusiasm can become enormous while gradually destroying some of the qualities that made it special.

BlackBerry works well because it avoids presenting the birth of RIM as a corporate success myth. There is humor, chaos, ego, bad decisions, ambition and a constant feeling that nobody fully controls what is happening. Success seems to move faster than the characters' ability to understand it.

Jay Baruchel captures the obsessive, technical side of Mike Lazaridis very effectively. His character represents the brilliant engineer who believes that making the best product should be enough. Opposite him, Glenn Howerton arrives as a much more aggressive force, focused on growth, pressure and conquering the market. That clash of personalities gives the film much of its energy.

Matt Johnson, who also directs, provides the group's most chaotic and endearing side. His presence constantly reminds us that everything began in an almost amateur environment, with people who enjoyed fixing things, playing games, listening to music and working without yet imagining what kind of corporate monster it could become.

That makes the company's evolution especially interesting. The film is not just another story about geeks having a brilliant idea and becoming rich. What really works is watching priorities change once money, investors, competition and the need for expansion enter the picture. That is where BlackBerry becomes more bitter.

The part that interested me most was exactly that: seeing how a company that once dominated its market becomes vulnerable to its own decisions, its structure and a technological environment changing too quickly. The film turns the rise and fall of RIM into something far more entertaining than a story about phones and executives might suggest.

The soundtrack helps enormously. Elastica, New Order, Fugazi and other period tracks are not simply nostalgic decoration; they are part of the characters' identity and of that technological moment. There is something physical and analogue about the early stages that contrasts very effectively with the corporate world that comes later.

Visually, the film has an almost documentary energy, with restless camerawork, crowded offices and staging that avoids making the story look too polished. That suits it because it creates the feeling of watching something important emerge from disorder.

Not everything has the same strength. Some characters are reduced to fairly clear functions, and the film occasionally simplifies things to keep the conflict moving. I also do not think it reaches the depth of the best business or technology dramas. But it has pace, personality and enough critical distance to avoid becoming retro advertising for a vanished brand.

For those of us who lived through that period, there is also an unavoidable element of memory. For several years BlackBerry represented absolute modernity, one of those objects that seemed destined to last forever. Watching its story now creates an odd mixture of nostalgia and distance: it is striking how quickly something that once seemed indispensable could become a relic of another era.

BlackBerry entertained me a lot. It has strong pacing, energetic performances, a great soundtrack and, above all, understands that the most interesting part of a success story is often seeing how the cracks begin to appear. More than a film about a phone, it becomes a story about people who build something enormous and discover too late that making it grow can also mean losing it.