BlackBerry (2023)
Directed by Matt Johnson
No — BlackBerry is not woke, scoring 11 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
BlackBerry arrives as a Canadian biographical comedy-drama about the rise and fall of a smartphone, which is to say it concerns three white men in Waterloo, Ontario, shouting at each other in offices of declining quality.
Consciousness Markers
The film satirizes corporate greed, illegal backdated stock options, and cut-throat ambition, offering a mild critique of runaway tech capitalism, though it stops short of an explicit eat-the-rich polemic.
The film is a wry satire that shows rather than preaches, delivering its cautionary tale about tech hubris through comedy rather than moralizing lectures.
The cast is overwhelmingly white and male, with only minor actors of colour in supporting roles and no conscious diversity casting agenda.
Mike Lazaridis is coded as a socially awkward 'egghead' engineering savant, a faint nerd-stereotype that gestures toward neurodivergent coding but is never made explicit or framed as advocacy.
Women are largely absent from the film and serve as background figures; there is no feminist framing or gendered critique.
The film deals with corporate power struggles among white executives and makes no commentary on race or racial injustice.
No LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes appear anywhere in the film.
Environmental concerns play no role in this tech-industry rise-and-fall narrative.
No body image, weight, or body positivity themes are present.
The film dramatizes real events loosely but does not rewrite history for ideological purposes, so no revisionist agenda is present.
Why it received this score
BlackBerry arrives as a Canadian biographical comedy-drama about the rise and fall of a smartphone, which is to say it concerns three white men in Waterloo, Ontario, shouting at each other in offices of declining quality. Matt Johnson directs with a handheld restlessness that suggests a documentary crew wandered into a corporate implosion, and the result is genuinely funny. The film has no interest in instructing anyone. It observes, it satirizes, and it moves on. This is a picture content to let its audience draw conclusions in the parking lot.
The most prominent social instinct on display is a mild disdain for runaway tech capitalism. Backdated stock options, poached engineers, hostile takeovers, a hockey franchise purchased as a vanity project: the machinery of greed is laid out and mocked. It stops well short of a polemic. Nobody is eaten, no wealth is redistributed, and the executives remain recognizably human in their appetites. Jay Baruchel's Lazaridis carries a faint egghead coding, the awkward savant who prefers circuits to conversation, though the film never names it or advocates for it. Women appear as assistants and background figures, granted no interiority and no grievance. Race is simply not a subject here, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
The cast is white, the boardroom is white, and the concerns are white men losing money, which the film treats as comedy, not tragedy. There is no environmental thread, no body-image thread, no queer presence, no rewriting of the historical record for ideological convenience. Its cautionary tale is delivered through deadpan absurdity, not sermonizing. We are left with a sharp, unsentimental portrait of hubris, and a reminder that the first smartphone now commands a market share of nothing. A tidy fate. The film does not moralize about it, which is its quiet virtue.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Two mismatched entrepreneurs – egghead innovator Mike Lazaridis and cut-throat businessman Jim Balsillie – joined forces in an endeavour that was to become a worldwide hit in little more than a decade. The story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic demise of the world's first smartphone.
Questions about BlackBerry
Is BlackBerry woke?
No — BlackBerry is not woke, scoring 11 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does BlackBerry have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Eat the Rich (30). On Eat the Rich: The film satirizes corporate greed, illegal backdated stock options, and cut-throat ambition, offering a mild critique of runaway tech capitalism, though it stops short of an explicit eat-the-rich polemic.
How does BlackBerry compare to other 2023 movies?
It ranks #142 of the 200 films from 2023 we've scored; their average is 24. The wokest is Origin (84).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.