Movie review: 'Chronicle'

With such sci-fi and horror hits as “Cloverfield” and the “Paranormal Activity” series, the found footage film has experienced renewed success in recent years.  With “Chronicle”, director Josh Trank takes this technique and applies it to a genre that it hasn’t explored yet: the superhero film.  But the results are mixed at best.

The film’s main protagonist is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a social misfit who for some reason decides to start filming everything.  He attends a party with his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and Matt’s popular friend, Steve (Michael B. Jordan).  They come across a hole in the ground that is making some strange noise, so, as any carefree teenager would do, they jump right in.  Inside, there are caverns that lead to a large glowing object, which of course they touch without hesitating.  Later on, they find that they have telekinesis.  As they gradually build the strength of their powers—from tossing balls to moving cars to flying—Andrew—who has never been popular, is frequently abused by his alcoholic father, and has a dying mother—becomes intoxicated by the idea of what he can do with these talents, and begins to take them outside the backyard.  Needless to say, many of the things he does with them aren’t too pretty.

In some ways, this does work as a found footage film.  It makes sense that Andrew would want to film all the crazy stuff he and his friends can suddenly do.  But that gets complicated toward the end as the action escalates.  Trank realizes this, so the action isn’t seen through the lens of Andrew’s camera all the time—it switches between his, Matt’s girlfriend’s, security camera footage, and the cell phone camera of random pedestrians.  This is done in a way that is jarring and sloppy and doesn’t really work that well.  If Trank wanted to see some of the action from a point of view other than Andrew’s, why didn’t he just not film it as a found footage film?  The story is solid enough and the viewpoints switch around enough that it would have worked just has well, without having to come up with lame excuses as to why so-and-so is now filming whatever is going on.  Which brings me to another issue, one that I always have with these kinds of movies: why do the characters film absolutely everything, including the most intimate conversations?  For instance, at one point Andrew’s dad yells at him about his camera, but the camera is still on and filming them.  It doesn’t really make sense, and in situation like that, the audience can probably fill in the blank as to what happened if the scene just isn’t filmed altogether.

But overall, outside of some of the technicalities, “Chronicle” works.  The special effects are great, the characters are interesting, and the action and suspense builds steadily until the climax, when everything just loses control.  While their reactions to their newfound powers maybe should have been more shocked, the three leads act as I believe any average teenager would if they realized they could move objects with their mind.  At first, they play games with Legos and footballs.  Then, they play pranks on people at the store.  It makes sense that Matt and Steve would be the carefree ones, and Andrew the one to exploit his powers, which I will say let them do some interesting things with the camera, as he moves and twists it around with his mind quite a bit.

Despite its flaws, “Chronicle” is interesting in that it explores what the average kid would do if he had superpowers but didn’t use them to fight crime.  It’s an angle on a popular genre that surprisingly hasn’t been done yet, but that hopefully others will continue to expand upon—just maybe not in the form of a found footage film.

Runtime: 84 minutes.  Rated PG-13 for intense action and violence, thematic material, some language, sexual content and teen drinking.

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