Running Time: 1 hour, 24 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Josh Trank
Quick Impressions:
Last Friday night, we promised to take the kids to a movie. My three-year-old picked Beauty and the Beast 3D, so she could see the new Tangled cartoon. Meanwhile, my husband lamented, “It’s too bad she’s not old enough to see Chronicle. That comes out today.” He kept up the talk about Chronicle. Finally, I asked, “What’s Chronicle?” He reminded me of the preview. With a burst of realization, I cried, “Oh yeah! I really want to see that, too! I just didn’t remember the name. I thought Chronicle was one of those movies about angels killing people. There are so many of those.” The look on my husband’s face told me immediately that only in my imagination is there a teeming subgenre of films about angels killing people.
Anyway, Chronicle is a movie about three teens who develop psychokinesis. They’re certainly not angels, but I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility that they kill people. (I try to keep the reviews spoiler free.)
Besides having psychokinesis, they also have a video camera, so the movie is presented mainly in a shaky, first-person perspective, kind of like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project. This gives us a feeling of immediacy and motion sickness. (That last part is mainly a joke. The camera work isn’t all that shaky.)
The movie has precisely seven characters that count. Of primary importance are the three guys who get powers. There’s Steve (Michael B. Jordan), the popular, amiable class president; Matt (Alex Russell), the philosophical, boring one; and, finally, Andrew (Dane DeHaan), the loner who’s always hiding behind a video camera. Of these three, Andrew is clearly the most brooding and disturbed and with good reason. His mother (Bo Peterson) is terminally ill, and his father (Michael Kelly) is an abusive drunk. (They’re characters four and five.) Character 6, Matt’s longtime crush, Casey Letter (Ashley Hinshaw), also has an obsession with capturing every moment of her life on video. But she’s not creepy like Andrew because she has a blog and luscious, blonde curls. The seventh character is this random girl with pink hair (Anna Wood) who makes poor choices at parties. Other people come and go throughout the story, but we don’t get much face time or meaningful dialogue from them.
The Good:
Stuff happens constantly. We meet Andrew first, and he’s a character who’s easy to watch. (Even he thinks so. Most people use a camera to record other people, but he manages to get himself in the video whenever possible.) Andrew has a miserable but interesting life and catches our attention immediately.
In the course of just a few minutes, Chronicle manages to introduce every major player. The exposition blends seamlessly into the movie’s major complication, the story of how the trio of protagonists acquires their powers and begins to use them.
The story is surprisingly solid, and the plot advances quickly as action and character development occur simultaneously. As the credits will attest, the film is jam-packed with catchy songs and also boasts some pretty decent special effects, but neither of these detracts from the focus of the story.
Best of all, the movie does a good job of both providing satisfactory resolution and setting up a possible sequel.
The movie also has some intellectually intriguing aspects. In Chronicle’s action-packed finale, we get the perspective of not just one video camera, but, instead, the footage from several different types of recording devices. In urban areas of the United States in 2012, our public actions are almost always monitored to some degree. Food for thought.
Best Scene Visually:
The movie has some impressive visual effects, particularly in the expensive-looking final showdown, but the scene that really sticks with me is Andrew’s encounter with a spider on his bedroom floor. Not only does the moment have a visual elegance—i.e., it looks cool—but it provides a useful peek into Andrew’s state of mind.
Best Surprise:
The preview doesn’t spoil the movie. Honestly, it doesn’t. You’ve seen the preview, right? It ends as one of the guys uses his powers to make an aggressive driver swerve off the edge of the road into peril, and the other two guys freak out. That’s not the actual crisis of the movie (though I won’t swear it’s not foreshadowing).
Funniest Moment:
This movie is oddly lacking in humor. When the protagonists are laughing, we usually feel apprehensive instead of amused. (At least, I felt like an outsider, distanced from the joke.) Basically the boys are at their least sympathetic when they’re giddily drunk on their own new found powers. This is particularly true in Andrew’s case. The more tortured Andrew was, the more I wanted to watch him, but when he was laughing, I just found him creepy. The funniest character is probably Steve simply because he seems well adjusted and generally kind with a sense of humor fairly normal in a teenaged boy. Plus, of the three leads, only Michael B. Jordan makes his performance look effortless, natural. So even though Steve cracks himself up much more than he amuses the audience, at least his humor feels genuine and pleasant. Still, the movie is emphatically not a comedy. It probably has the least humor I’ve seen in a teen movie in recent memory.
Best Action Sequence:
The final showdown stands out, but my heart belongs to the scenes in the sky. I wish I could fly.
Most Uncanny Resemblance to Mark Hamill:
Dane DeHaan gives the most emotionally powerful performance in the film as Andrew. He’s wonderfully wounded, brooding, and emotive. But I swear, there’s this part near the end where he gazes up at another character and looks exactly like Luke Skywalker just after [spoilers] Darth Vader has told him he’s his father.
[The spoilers thing was a joke. Go ahead and read the previous sentence. It won’t spoil Chronicle—unless any reminder of Luke Skywalker at his whiniest spoils a movie for you.]
The Negatives:
There are a few things that don’t make sense. In real life, stuff happens in a certain way. When you lose your video camera, someone may buy you a more expensive replacement. But does the more expensive replacement camera also come with more expensive replacement footage of what has already happened to you? If so, I sure hope one of my cousins buys me an expensive camera like that. The things money can buy these days!
It seems to me that, realistically, the movie should start at the point when the boys are trying out their new powers in the back yard. Or at least, it shouldn’t contain any scenes from the rave or what happens immediately after the rave.
Then again, who are we? I’m not saying that we, the audience, don’t have the right to criticize the movie. I’m genuinely asking, who is the audience of this sci-fi angst fest? In the movie Cloverfield, we learn the origins of the footage we see at the beginning of the movie. Chronicle is different. It shows us all different kinds of footage from various sources. Why has this footage been assembled? Why are we able to watch it? Granted, most traditionally filmed movies don’t answer this question. But when a movie purports to be showing you the actual origins of the footage, you can’t help but wonder how all of these scraps of video gold have come together. In other words, the style of the film raises the issues of origins, authenticity, and purpose but doesn’t address them.
I can think of one character in the movie who might be motivated to assemble all the various footage we see in order to try to make sense of what happened, but unless we see in a sequel that this is indeed what took place, then I find all of this uncertainty a weakness of the film.
Another thing really bugged me, too. In high school (as in life in general), people always judge others based on appearance. Very quickly, kids get reputations and labels, generally based on very superficial traits that may not actually define them. Chronicle disappointed me here. First impressions (even by distant observers) are always correct. Ask any student at their school about Steve, Matt, and Andrew, and they’ll tell you right away who’s a good guy, who’s average but decent, and who’s creepy. And they’ll be right. That’s disappointing.
Andrew as a character has so much potential. I think most of it is wasted. Granted, at a certain critical point in the film, we realize he could go one of two ways. That he goes the way he does is less disappointing than that he reaches the end of that way so quickly. This film could have launched a new kind of super hero franchise. It still might, but I feel it wasted some of its resources.
Overall:
I’ve known so many young men with a passionate interest in philosophy. I presume that this movie will validate their life choices with its clear message that sometimes, it’s best to think things through methodically rather than acting based on any sort of emotionally charged motivation (whether the emotion is positive or negative).
Chronicle is action-packed, intense, and a good way to spend an hour and twenty-four minutes. Why not go? (Plus, you’ll probably see some cool previews.)