With Chronicle I've finally had to accept that no matter how good a movie is, I can't really enjoy it if it makes me physically ill. Whenever I try to watch one of these hand-held video, "found footage" flicks in the theater, I can only make it about 40 minutes in before the all the camera movement gives me a headache and light nausea. Which is frustrating in this case because this film is not just a good example of its particular genre of storytelling, it's a pretty good story by any standard. But just as it wound up to its emotional climax, I couldn't really get into it because I was trying to avoid climaxing my lunch onto the theater floor. So, if you're like me and prone to motion sickness from this kind of thing, you'll have the same problem. If you're free of that particular weakness, you might enjoy this motion picture a whole lot.
On the surface, Chronicle is about three high school kids who crawl down into a hole one right and find something that gives them the power of mind over matter. When you look a little closer, though, it's actually a super-hero story. Except instead of focusing on a hero who learns "with great power comes great responsibility", this is all about the origin of the super-villain and what the hero learns is that the responsible thing is to NOT dress up in a costume and try to fight crime.
The budding bad guy is Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan), an introverted high school loser with a dying mother and an abusive father. His cousin Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) is the sort of loner who thinks himself above the teenage experience and reads philosophy books to validate that feeling. The third, but in no way inessential, wheel is Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan), the hot shot class president who's so normal, happy and well adjusted he doesn't have the slightest clue what to do with his power or the ambition to figure it out. The "found footage" of the story comes from the camera Andrew constantly keeps with him, though his eventual use of his power to manipulate the camera without touching it does give Chronicle a look that's quite different that other movies of this type. Now, you can't explain or rationalize any of it as some sort of documentary made from video recovered after events occurred, but it seems that convention of the genre is being dispensed with more and more as time goes on. I suppose that's good for the long term heath of the genre, but it's going to allow increasing implausible and hard to swallow storytelling.
While there's a subplot involving Matt and a pretty young blogger (Ashley Hinshaw), the heart of this film is watching the moral disintegration that comes when you give incredible power to someone with the inner demons from a lifetime of social isolation and parental abuse. The lesson being that an unhappy person who becomes powerful doesn't become happy. They just get the ability to act out on their misery. And it is in that dynamic that the character of Steve is so important to the movie. While Andrew is a high school reject, Steve is the most popular guy in class and Chronicle embraces the reality that popular kids like Steve usually aren't douches or jerks. That's a stereotype propagated by writers, who were often the uncool kids in their class. Popular high school students are often no better or worse than anyone else, they're just more outgoing and socially capable than their geeky, withdrawn classmates. While the main relationship in the story is between Andrew and Matt, Steve is the lightning rod for Andrew's transformation into a bad guy and provides a moral clarity and structure to Andrew's predatory evolution.
If you put Chronicle into the alternative super-hero genre, this is one of the best ones that's been made to date. If you classify it as a "found footage" flick, I'd only put it behind the verisimilitude of The Blair Witch Project and the inspired filmmaking of Video X. You should definitely watch it that is, if you can keep a clear head and a calm stomach.
On the surface, Chronicle is about three high school kids who crawl down into a hole one right and find something that gives them the power of mind over matter. When you look a little closer, though, it's actually a super-hero story. Except instead of focusing on a hero who learns "with great power comes great responsibility", this is all about the origin of the super-villain and what the hero learns is that the responsible thing is to NOT dress up in a costume and try to fight crime.
The budding bad guy is Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan), an introverted high school loser with a dying mother and an abusive father. His cousin Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) is the sort of loner who thinks himself above the teenage experience and reads philosophy books to validate that feeling. The third, but in no way inessential, wheel is Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan), the hot shot class president who's so normal, happy and well adjusted he doesn't have the slightest clue what to do with his power or the ambition to figure it out. The "found footage" of the story comes from the camera Andrew constantly keeps with him, though his eventual use of his power to manipulate the camera without touching it does give Chronicle a look that's quite different that other movies of this type. Now, you can't explain or rationalize any of it as some sort of documentary made from video recovered after events occurred, but it seems that convention of the genre is being dispensed with more and more as time goes on. I suppose that's good for the long term heath of the genre, but it's going to allow increasing implausible and hard to swallow storytelling.
While there's a subplot involving Matt and a pretty young blogger (Ashley Hinshaw), the heart of this film is watching the moral disintegration that comes when you give incredible power to someone with the inner demons from a lifetime of social isolation and parental abuse. The lesson being that an unhappy person who becomes powerful doesn't become happy. They just get the ability to act out on their misery. And it is in that dynamic that the character of Steve is so important to the movie. While Andrew is a high school reject, Steve is the most popular guy in class and Chronicle embraces the reality that popular kids like Steve usually aren't douches or jerks. That's a stereotype propagated by writers, who were often the uncool kids in their class. Popular high school students are often no better or worse than anyone else, they're just more outgoing and socially capable than their geeky, withdrawn classmates. While the main relationship in the story is between Andrew and Matt, Steve is the lightning rod for Andrew's transformation into a bad guy and provides a moral clarity and structure to Andrew's predatory evolution.
If you put Chronicle into the alternative super-hero genre, this is one of the best ones that's been made to date. If you classify it as a "found footage" flick, I'd only put it behind the verisimilitude of The Blair Witch Project and the inspired filmmaking of Video X. You should definitely watch it that is, if you can keep a clear head and a calm stomach.