Review No.20: Chronicle

Ever since The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 the 'found footage' style of film has been incredibly popular being used in a large amount of films from Cloverfield to the staggeringly popular Paranormal Activity films and last year's very entertaining Nordic movie Troll Hunter. Now in the same mould we have Chronicle a film largely seen from the point-of-view from high school outsider Andrew who decides on a whim to chronicle his everyday life. It seems that is everyday life is quite sad at home he is beaten by his former fire fighter father or caring for his terminally-ill mother while at school he is a loner with his only friend being his philosophy loving cousin Matt. After Matt convinces Andrew to come to a party the two of them along with high school king Steve find a mysterious hole in the ground and after they journey down they find they have special powers. From this point on I don't want to give too much away but the trailers have shown the trio bending forks and crashing cars with Andrew trying to use his new found power to seek revenge but he's held back by the rational Steve and the somewhat scared Matt. However as you can imagine things take turns for the worse but I'll leave you guessing to what they are.

I have to say that Chronicle is a very interesting film and the fact that the film is seen from the point-of-view of whoever is holding the camera is a neat little trick. So we see Andrew's lonely life where he eats his lunch on his own on the bleachers and gets beaten up regularly by the jocks meanwhile the vain Matt turns the camera on himself and the girl-obsessed Steve keeps turning away from the main action to focus on various female's assets. It's also an interesting idea to give three different high school kids these powers as it shows how they've been treated up to this point affects the way in which they use them. The effects themselves are pretty impressive but maybe the scenes where they find out what exactly they can do were where the script-writers concentrated the most on as character development was very sparse. I did find a lot of the time that Chronicle was basically using a lot of stereotypes to further the plot which is not always a bad thing in films such as this but I feel had it spent a bit more time letting us get to know Matt, Andrew and Steve this could've been more than an entertaining sci-fi film. The cast of mainly unknowns does well with what its been given and the stand-out for me was Micheal B Jordan as Steve but then he has a lot more experience than the others appearing on both Friday Night Lights and The Wire. After Chronicle had finished I really didn't know what to make of it because it did have some good ideas and filmic devices but there were a lot of ambiguities with the plot and the characters were very slight but as I previously mentioned it had so much more potential that it failed to use.

Verdict: Overall a good entry into the found footage cannon and an entertaining Friday night popcorn film but this could've been so much more so regrettably I can only give it 6.5/10