Chronicle, Chronicled

Chronicle, Chronicled

SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!

Woo….. another teen superhero film.

Or is it?

Chronicle follows three teens who get super telekinetic powers from touching a rock, er…. thing, in an underground cave. It then follows their different reactions to their telekinesis. We have Steve, the confident character, running for class president who likes to feel on top, Matt, who wants the group to be responsible and keep their powers hidden, and Andrew, a social outcast, the bullied kid who has parent-issues who slowly loses his grasp on his new found strength.

The story was pretty tight, nice to see the parallel reactions to the powers. In particular Andrew, (played by Dane DeHaan) stole the show with his transformation particularly well handled. Andrew always keeps a barrier between himself and the world, from his camera at the start to a physical manifestation when his powers go into overload and he becomes more obsessed with his strength. It’s a classic case of a weak character craving power, getting what he wants and then losing himself to it, resulting in him killing his best friend, trying to kill his dad and essentially trying to blow up half of the city.  Other characters are likeable but not as relatable. Matt, who is the sensible backbone of the group, allows Andrew and Steven to show off the powers in a talent show, which is quite out of character. Steven provides a lot of the comedy and it’s a real shock when he dies so early. The girl…. Er…. I can’t remember her name, was a bit of a lame love interest for Matt. Her obsession with recording things on her camcorder (for her blog), made her a better match for Andrew and there wasn’t really much connection with Matt. Nice to see though that half the movie wasn’t concerned with the origin of the powers, sooner than half an hour in everyone’s powered up the film doesn’t focus on explaining how or why, allowing character development to take centre stage. I did however think there was more potential with their nosebleeds as their powers cutting out or overloading, but not much came of these occurrences.

Of course the Cloverfield, Blair Witch, home video style camera sets this apart from a lot of ‘superpowered’ movies. What is particularly inventive for this style is that the telekinesis can allow the camera to move freely and track around the characters, while maintaining the homemade documentary style.  I really like this touch with the trio, Andrew in particular, ‘chronicling’ their journey. At times it did get a bit distracting with things like static on the camera and just the pure amount of different quality cameras, some with sound and some not.

Overall this was a nice change to shake up the ‘super powered genre’, with a mostly engaging story, staying fresh thanks to the documentary approach and with surprisingly good special effects for a low budget film and. (Seriously, when you look at the flying effects in this and compare it to last year’s mega budget Green Lantern it makes the latter even more laughable.) Definitely worth a trip out to see this one.

Pros: Good character development, good special effects.

Cons: Some plot elements weren’t expanded on enough ; the nosebleeds, the love story

Overall 3.5/5