For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - Chronicle
The Impression:
A found footage film mated with a superhero film? Could be
interesting. More interesting is the huge studio interest in
Josh Trank post-Chronicle. Not to say that studio
interest means anything anymore, but, it might mean good
things.
The Reality:
The first twenty-five minutes of Chronicle are what
you need to get through if you want to enjoy the rest of the
movie. It’s the set-up of the film, three teenagers (one
dork, one jock, one former-popular kid) find a strange
meteor in the ground and it gives them, well, powers to do
things. Powers that if they use too much cause headaches and
nosebleeds. Powers that are getting stronger each and every
day. For the first twenty minutes, maybe even thirty or
forty minutes, the three kids act incredibly annoying (say
stupid shit, do even stupider shit, listen to shitty music),
then get powers and proceed to act equally annoying but with
a bevy of classic superhero powers (strength, flight,
telekinesis) to add to their ability to annoy. I thought
perhaps this film would just annoy me, but the realization
struck me that this film, and these good actors, were
portraying high schoolers completely straight. High school
kids are obnoxious (I’ve been one) and if granted powers
instead of instantaneously becoming honorable crime fighting
super heroes, they’d probably pull some stupid pranks and
abuse their abilities. Once you’ve settled in to Trask’s
remarkably accurate portrayal of this age range the rest of
the movie is actually pretty strong, if not predictable.
Kids get stronger and stronger, the nerdy kid (yet the
strongest with his powers) goes a little bit off the deep
end and a whole hell of a lot of bad stuff happens. Trask
makes the found footage stuff work though, using the
obnoxious constant presence of cellphone cameras and iPad
cameras and film-related technology to give us a wide berth
of angles and perspectives. It’s stylish and surprisingly
sleek, and after the film ended the dark cloud of annoying
teenage angst had vanished and I found myself uniformly
happy with the way the film had ended.
The Lesson:
Teenagers are annoying. Give them superpowers and they’re
downright unbearable. Unless they’re beating up police,
destroying shit, and punching each other through buildings.
Then, then they’re okay.
-
-
Unless
otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any
related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by
John Laird under a
Creative Commons License.
