Review: Chronicle (2012)

I’d had several people talk good things about Chronicle when it first hit theaters, but it wasn’t until the other day that I finally got the chance to sit down and view it.  I have to say, I was not disappointed at all.  The movie is basically an origin story, following the tale of three teenagers that stumble upon a meteor that gives them super powers.  Yeah, the premise is a bit generic, but it’s the way that the movie is executed that makes it so compelling.

One of the three affected kids, Andrew, has decided that he is going to videotape everything that goes on in his life.  Thus, the found-footage style of the film.  This mixes in with another filming person and some various shots using security cameras and other sources to produce a nice effect that brings this style of filming a bit further to becoming something more than just the shaky-cam approach that old-school flicks such as Blair Witch used.

Anyways, back to the film itself… Andrew and his pals discover they have telekinetic powers.  They play with them and become stronger, graduating from floating Legos to actually flying through the air and making telekinetic shields around themselves.  Andrew, however, has had a bad life, unlike his buddies.  His father is abusive, his mother dying and everyone uses him as their resident punching bag.  Thus, the makings of either a great hero or an evil villain are set.  As the movie progresses, Andrew becomes the most powerful of the three.  So too does he become the most mentally unstable of them.  Accidents happen, people get hurt and then a final showdown concludes the story of this film.

Though much of the film could be considered to be composed of generic super hero plotline elements, the execution really made it something different.  This movie explores what it takes to make a hero or a villain, but does it in a way that seems more realistic than almost anything done before.  We get a believable life experience that creates a cause-and-effect that we can get behind and an ending that is not necessarily happy, but satisfying none-the-less.

Put together by Max Landis and Josh Trank, Chronicle was also directed by Trank and the end result is a movie that was both written and executed well.  It makes me pretty happy to know that Trank is onboard to direct and write the new Fantastic Four film and may even be involved in an upcoming Venom project.  There may yet be hope for more complex super hero movies in our future.

Though the Rotten Tomatoes score was a bit mixed, with critics giving it 85% compared to viewers’ 71%, I would recommend this film to anyone that enjoys super hero flicks but is getting tired of the generic and often unrealistic good vs. evil paradigm that unfolds conveniently so that things end up very black and white.  Chronicle is, in my opinion, a classic of super hero storytelling.

Photo Credits -           

Chronicle poster courtesy of beyondhollywood.com