Chronicle (2012) **/*****
The three protagonists of Chronicle are relatively normal kids until they find a mysterious hole in the ground. Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is the outcast, Steve (Michael B. Jordan) the popular guy, and Matt (Alex Russell) the uh… guy who quotes things. That all changes once they foolhardily spelunk into the hole, which is emitting a strange hum, however. While exploring they come across a big glowing something or other, and after touching it they develop the extraordinary ability to move things with their minds. What follows is the tale of what these young men decide to do with such strange and powerful abilities. And, surprisingly enough, nobody puts on a spandex outfit, no code-names are chosen, and the fate of the world never hangs in the balance. Instead, despite its super power conceit, Chronicle makes the atypical choice of keeping its focus squarely on the teenage experience. That sounds refreshing on the page, but there’s a catch… concept is the only place where this movie manages to be anything other than typical. And the further you get into its run time, the more of a been there, done that experience it becomes.
Chronicle does have its good points. The sequences where the boys explore their powers offer up quite a bit of escapist fun and actually take up a much larger portion of the movie than they usually do in these teens who become super tales. And the sequences where they decide to use their powers to make the nerdy one popular felt like they were about to become a fun twist on the girl with glasses and a ponytail lets her hair down and becomes a hottie trope (even if the concept of high school kids going gaga over a nerd doing an impressive magic act at a talent show made me roll my eyes a bit). But, unfortunately, the bad eventually outweighs the good.
The biggest problem the film has to overcome is that its main character, the put-upon nerd Andrew, is completely unlikable. The real meat of Chronicle’s storytelling is in its detailing of how Andrew goes from being lonely and abused to being powerful and unhinged, and in order to get there the filmmakers use every heavy-handed trick in the book. Andrew is bullied everywhere he goes, with never a second going by without somebody looking to cave in his head or call him a creep. When he’s at home he has to deal with the abusive yelling and throttling of his alcoholic father while the cartoonish death moans of his ill mother constantly ring out in the background, providing the soundtrack of his life. We spend lots of time alone with Andrew as he explains his feelings to us, or as he cries. I mean, we spend a lot of time with him as he cries. The effect is that the movie seems to be begging for us to sympathize with the character so much that we end up hating him; even before he starts to angrily lash out. Instead of feeling conflicted or empathetic toward his actions, I wanted to knock him into a locker and give him a wedgie. I mean, seriously kid, quit sticking your video camera in everyone’s faces, wipe the tears out of your eyes, and stop leering at all of the cheerleaders like a weirdo. I get that your family life sucks, but you’re doing this to yourself.
None of the other characters offer us respite from Andrew’s oppressive self pity either, because they’re all so paper thin they hardly get defined personalities, let alone any development. Steve is the affable, well-liked guy; and that’s about it. Matt… I can’t even tell you who Matt is. He often quotes popular philosophers, but I can’t necessarily call that his personality trait, because in no other way does he come off as bookish or intellectual. As a matter of fact, he’s hard to define in any way other than as an invisible everyman. So what was the point of all the philosophy talk? The quotes didn’t fit the character’s behavior, they didn’t color anything going on, they didn’t lead to anything plot wise; it mostly felt like they were just added to stick something that sounded smart into the script, so that we understand that this movie is so much deeper and less disposable than other super hero properties. And speaking of tacked on, what was the deal with the Casey (Ashley Hinshaw) character? She’s a pretty, blonde video blogger that we’re introduced to, several times, who doesn’t end up being in the movie for any reason. She develops a little bit of a romance with the Matt character, but their interactions never go anywhere or have any impact on the rest of the film, whatsoever. As a matter of fact, in the film’s coda, where we find out what Matt is doing with his life, she doesn’t even seem to be a factor. Her character reads like they realized late in the process that this entire movie was about three guys spending every waking hour together and hugging a lot, without a girl in sight, so they tacked a romantic subplot onto things so that the story didn’t start looking like some sort of superhero allegory for gayness.
Forgive me for injecting my own stupid fan-fiction nonsense into this review, but talking about things in this movie that didn’t end up going anywhere has made my mind go off on another little tangent. Early on in the film, when the boys are still experimenting with and having fun with their powers, we get a scene where they accidentally cause a car wreck. A guy in a truck is tailgating them and laying on his horn, seemingly at random, so Andrew pushes him off the road. Unfortunately, he crashes in a lake and is very seriously injured. Who the guy is never gets explained though, and he’s never really spoken of again. Did something as big as almost killing and maybe crippling a man just get casually depicted only to foreshadow Andrew’s slipping into darkness? How about instead of doing the well-worn heroes and villains origin story stuff with these boys, which all leads to the obligatory super powered fight that causes massive property damage, we just tell a tale about their growing together and then apart? What if the fallout from what happened to the guy in the truck eventually tears three best friends apart? Maybe they all start using their powers in different ways, which changes them into different people, and we follow the paths they take through the rest of their high school careers. The nerd becomes cool, the popular guy a recluse. Keep the story small, keep the story personal, and make your unique concept actually count for something with unique execution. Never get a police chopper involved, never smash a building, never blow up a car, just explore the possibilities of how having super powers could change the experience of high school. Sure, the big superhero battle at the end is impressive, but only in a “wow, they had a really small budget and they managed to do a lot of big stuff that didn’t look so bad” way. So was it worth it? I don’t want to get too far off the rails with talking about what might have been, as this is supposed to be a review of a movie that exists, not a pitch for one that doesn’t. Suffice to say, Chronicle feigned at going in an interesting, new direction, but in the end it just defaulted to the tried and true.
Before we wrap this up, let’s talk about the fact that this was a documentary style film. It would be pretty impossible to thoroughly discuss this one and not bring up the camera work. Instead of shooting this like a normal movie, Chronicle’s filmmakers present it as being footage shot by the characters themselves as they go about their business. So, of course, that means we have to sit through a bunch of clumsy explanations as to why there’s always a camera around. This is a step off from most “found footage” films though. While what we’re watching appears to be assembled from shots taken by handheld cameras, security cameras, camera phones, etc… no story is ever created around who collected all of this footage together and edited it into the movie we’re watching. So really, instead of being a found footage film, this is more a movie shot in the style of a found footage film, and I have to say, I’m racking my brain trying to figure out what the point of that is. There is no reason for this movie to not be shot traditionally. As a matter of fact, it could only have been improved by doing so. All the found footage strategy accomplishes is inserting a bunch of hurdles into the script that need to be leapt over with expository dialogue and making everything look aesthetically worse. There is only one explanation I can come up with for why this movie is presented to us the way it is, and it involves the film’s young creators John Trank and Max Landis getting together and having a conversation that goes something like, “So, uh, we’ve got the idea… does anyone here actually know how to shoot a movie?” Sadly, I guess the answer was no.
