Most superhero movies do not begin with a scene of domestic
violence. But then most superhero movies aren’t Chronicle. The feature film debut
of director Joshua Trank, Chronicle feels
surprisingly original for a superhero movie and a found footage film. Despite
its many influences—Akira, Cloverfield, and Kick-Ass among them—Chronicle manages to synthesize its inspirations into a film all
its own: a superhero origin story built around an honest portrait of teenage angst.
Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) has a miserable life. At home,
his father is a violent drunk and his mother is bedridden. At school, he is bullied
and unpopular, eating his lunches alone on the bleachers. Even Andrew’s cousin and
only friend Matt (Alex Russell) doesn’t care for him. Andrew seems set for an
ordinary if uncommonly depressing future. Until, of course, his life changes forever.
At a party in an abandoned barn, Andrew, Matt, and popular kid Steve (Michael
B. Jordan) stumble upon a deep hole in the forest out back. Contained within is
a strange, glowing crystal. What this gem is or where it comes from remain a
mystery but suffice it to say, after encountering the crystal, three weeks
later the boys have superpowers.
Impervious to harm and able to move objects with their minds,
the trio realize their bodies have changed and immediately use their powers to…
screw around. They play pranks on bewildered locals, try to get girls, and goof
off to entertain each other. Andrew and his friends have great power and no
responsibility. They’re dumb teenagers who accept their awesome talents as another
new feature of adolescence. None of the boys are emotionally or morally prepared
for their powers, but none are less so than Andrew. Bitter and bullied all his
life, he finally has the power to make every violent and angry thought in his
head into reality. DeHaan plays Andrew with brooding self-enclosure and the
slow, labored speech of someone who’d prefer not to be talking at all. Chronicle succeeds largely because of its
intelligence in depicting Andrew and in making us feel sympathy for the neglected kid.
One of the film’s best sequences belongs entirely to Andrew, as he undergoes a
wardrobe change that’s paired marvelously with David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.”
If Chronicle has a
major weakness, it’s in Andrew’s cousin Matt. While Andrew plunges into
darkness, Matt ascends to popularity. Matt’s journey revolves mostly around his
romantic pursuit of Casey Letter (Ashley Hinshaw), a fellow classmate who films
everything she does in a Manic Pixie Dream Girl quirk that exists to maintain Chronicle’s “found footage” conceit. Casey
is not particularly interesting, or at least not enough so to make Matt’s
courtship of her as involving as Andrew’s concurrent personal drama. As a
result, the film feels a little lopsided, losing some of its steam every time
we turn from Andrew and his problems to Matt’s making googly eyes at Casey.
Still, Chronicle makes
more out of its scant budget than most superhero movies do with millions of
dollars more. I must have seen by now dozens of films in which characters fly
across the screen, and yet Chronicle
somehow makes the sight thrilling and fresh. So too with the movie’s fight
scenes, which have a physical reality and a sense of genuine peril usually lost
in blockbusters’ billion-bullets-a-minute approach. It’s not just that Chronicle puts its special effects to
good use—which it does—it’s that it situates its extraordinary events against a
drab landscape. Stripped free of Hollywood gleam, the film’s cinematography
captures the typically cloudy and rundown Seattle backdrop through a lens that by
nature makes flying and telekinesis look all the more fantastic. It helps too
that Chronicle’s leads couldn’t be
more delighted with their powers, going positively giddy every time they
discover some new use for them.
Chronicle
builds to an exciting if predictable climax that is hampered by the film’s refusal
to abandon its found footage format. Cobbled together from security tapes, news
recordings, and cell phone videos, Chronicle’s
last act is pointlessly cluttered, and the film would have done better with a
clean, straightforward finish. Nonetheless, the movie is a breath of fresh air
in the wasteland of winter cinema releases. An unusually smart riff on the
superhero mythos, it understands adolescent anguish as well as it does supermen
in costumes. Although in Chronicle they
don’t have costumes yet, they do have plenty of issues.
