On the exciting weekend that a Star Wars film was rereleased onto the big screen, I was taken to see Chronicle. Yeah. That actually happened. It’s been 2 days since The Phantom Menace came out, and I haven’t seen it yet. Even though I’ve been to the cinema. So, naturally I went into Chronicle rather grouchily, because while in my screen there would be a new, ‘original’, ‘superhero’ film, in another screen there would be Star Wars.
Moving on...
The first thing about Chronicle that I noticed is that it’s been done in the wildly-popular, definitely-not-overused, always-done-magnificently format of FOUND FOOTAGE. Thrilling. I wish Hollywood would stop doing this. Just stop ‘finding footage’. Every film of this type seems to go out of its way to shoehorn the concept of someone carrying a camera round for the entire duration, and generally it’s a bit awkward. The Blair Witch Project pulled it off well, as did Cloverfield. Chronicle decided to have its main protagonist wander around his school getting bullied, lugging this GIANT camera around with him. PRACTICAL. Star Wars had protagonists with lightsabers. Just sayin’.
The plot advances pretty well to begin with, as the film’s trio of leads (Andrew the camera guy, Matt the cousin guy and Steve the black guy) gain their powers, and develop them to greater strengths. There are a few scenes of the boys learning to telekinetically moving stuff around, which kinda reminded me of Anakin and Luke getting to grips with the Force in Star Wars. But it all builds well for a while, and it’s nicely paced as you start to get the idea that something big’s coming. The dialogue isn’t TOO awkward or generic for the most part, and the relationship between the three superfreaks is somewhat believable.
Aaaaand then it all starts to fall apart a bit. The plot reaches its zenith and begins to fizzle out. In the climactic action scenes it just doesn’t really seem to know where to go. It starts to get pretty predictable, and even a tad silly. There’s the increasingly weird and forced ways of utilising the FOUND FOOTAGE idea, as Andrew’s camera isn’t present towards the end, and also the sudden transition from Steve’s dea – oh wait, SPOILERS PEOPLE – to his funeral, frankly made me chuckle. I’m not really sure why, maybe it was just strange that the next immediate thing Andrew would film would be the funeral, and a strange way to reveal the death having not shown it in the actual confrontation scene. Plus there wasn’t much time in the funeral scene to reflect upon the tragedy. Not like Qui-Gon’s funeral.
Sooo, after it finished, I walked out feeling rather unsatisfied. Chronicle started out quite promising, but it fell into the usual clichéd traps of this sort of action film, and didn’t really bring anything new or exciting to the wonderful world of FOUND FOOTAGE. But it was sort of exciting, and I suppose it had some nice new twists to the ‘superhero’ genre, despite being riddled with the same old cautionary tale of not letting power go to your head. Like Star Wars.
In short, I had no strong feelings one way or the other. Except that we should’ve seen The Phantom Menace. Harumph.
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