INCLUDES 1996 APPLE POWERBOOK COMMERCIAL FEATURING TOM CRUISE HEADING INTO THE CAMERA EYE ON ITS SCREEN
![https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/mipowerbookad.jpg](https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/mipowerbookad.jpg)
An awesome opening credits montage in Matt Johnson's BlackBerry, released in theaters today, includes a quick clip from Apple's 1996 Mission: Impossible tie-in commercial for its PowerBook. "Vintage-style footage reigns over the opening credits of BlackBerry," Josh at the Movies writes in his review, "taking us back to the earliest days of the internet as the rise of cellular devices was just beginning to spread into the mainstream in a major way."
At Wired, John Semley writes:
In this movie, Johnson gives the pop culture geek a fairer, more forgiving, shake. He wanted to create what he calls “the anti-Big Bang Theory,” referring to the wildly popular syndicated sitcom that he regards “detestable.” “It’s no coincidence,” he points out, “that the guys who invented the first tele-communicator were all Star Trek fanatics.”BlackBerry’s opening credits montage situates the device as part of a longer pop culture lineage, running from Star Trek to Blade Runner, Inspector Gadget, and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. The sequence draws a direct line from the pop culture obsessives of the past and the technologists of the present. As Johnson puts it, “I don’t think the nerds of the '90s get enough credit for inventing the future.”
BlackBerry foregrounds this industriousness. In an early, legitimately thrilling sequence, a group of pale, bespectacled engineers frantically jury-rig a smartphone prototype out of a calculator, a TV remote, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a vintage Speak & Spell. Waking up at his desk the next morning in a puddle of his own drool, Doug declares, “I had a dream we were rich.” And then, citing Dune, “And sometimes my dreams occur exactly as I dreamt them.”
Previously:
IN 'MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE', APPLE INSISTED TOM CRUISE USE A MAC WHILE VILLAINS USED IBM