Movie Review: What Happens When a Young Filmmaker With Old ...

Location

Wide Release

Dates

Opens Feb 3

Chronicle really wants to take a page from Peter Parker?s playbook? and then rip the whole damn thing to shreds. With great power comes great responsibility, indeed. The same could be said for young filmmakers with a decently cool (but definitely done) idea and a decently big budget (a reported $14-15 million) for one of these ?found footage? films. For comparison purposes, the first Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000. Cloverfield, perhaps closer to Chronicle in intent, cost $25 million but had J.J. Abrams attached.

The plot is straightforward enough, with plenty of stock characters. Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) is a high school senior, and his life sucks in every way. His mom?s sick, his dad?s a mean drunk who beats him, and he doesn?t have any friends at school. Worst of all, he?s a virgin. The horror.

Lonely and angry, he buys himself a video camera and starts filming everything as a means of distancing himself from the cruel, cruel world. ?We don?t have to guess that that?s his purpose, by the way, another character actually asks him if the camera is supposed to be a barrier between himself and the world. Much of the dialogue (script is by newcomer Max Landis) is similarly pointed, as if the audience is incapable of figuring out the film?s rather thin metaphors for ourselves.

Andrew?s life and the first 15 minutes of the movie are incredibly boring. Finally, we get to the point when Andrew?s cousin Matt (Alex Russell, in the unfortunate role of ?teen who quotes famous philosophers as a way of seeming smart, worldly, and/or cultured but just ends up sounding like a pedantic adult stuffed words in his mouth?) drags him to a rave at an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the woods. Matt and football star Steve Montgomery find a hole in the ground and decide to do a little impromptu spelunking. They make Andrew come along to film whatever they find. And they definitely find something. Whatever it is, it?s enough to cave in their little hole and give all three of them telekinetic super powers.

None of these kids immediately think world domination, which is a nice way of keeping the story contained. They just make their everyday lives cooler and more fun by pulling (mostly) harmless pranks and teaching themselves how to fly. But Andrew, unstable guy that he is, starts using his power to take revenge on those who?ve wronged him. One the most visually effective shots is of Andrew lying the floor, contemplating what he?s done. A spider wanders into his purview. Andrew lifts it up, toys with it, then explodes it in a single, controlled motion. The arthopod becomes a constellation of bits and body parts. The thing about it is, who?s holding the camera? We could believe that Andrew?s got it floating around him, but it?s too nicely done for that.

First time director Josh Trank is playing at cin?ma v?rit? here, and hits all the requisite marks: shaky footage from a hand-held camera, sloppy editing (sometimes, actors are cut off mid-line; other times, the impact of a scene is utterly destroyed because every line seems spliced together from a different take), and an obnoxious dependency on jump cuts. The special effects are better than most, and the filmmakers have come up with surprisingly inventive ways for characters to die.

Any sort of uniqueness ends there, however, and the dependence is on the foot footage conceit to set it up apart from other superhero movies.?There?s no sex, no intrigue, none of the characters are the least bit curious about their powers.?I?d say that Chronicle forces us to think about the mythic origins of a superhero, or makes us contemplate how we?d handle sudden telekinesis. But that?s giving it a little too much credit, since like a self-absorbed teenager, the movie deals almost exclusively in emotional clich?s, splashing out professional special effects to make up for an amateur, unambitious story.

Source: http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2012/02/movie-review-what-happens-when-a-young-filmmaker-with-old-ideas-gets-a-big-budget-chronicle/

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