Review: Chronicle

It seemed enviable and obvious as soon as I saw it, which usually means it’s a good idea. Make a movie about three regular teenaged boys getting superpowers, and follow what such boys would actually do with them; make it “cheap” using the found-footage/we-accidentally-videotaped-a-movie trope of Blair Witch / Cloverfield (though the veneer of “on the cheap” vanishes by Chronicle’s grand finale); but give us a lead character who’d really want those superpowers, for reasons that only belong to a teenaged boy, and now you’re onto something.

From the outset, we understand why Andrew (Dane DeHaan) – naturally, the most reluctant to gerry down a hole in the ground that contains a pulsating meteor that evidently confers telekinetic power on those who go near it – quickly grabs hold of his new powers and squeezes them till they pop. Everyone beats the shit out of this guy. The usual jock twits at school, sure, but his father too, and if you can redirect all the natural testosterone rage of the father/son relationship in the teenaged years into something like a comic book story point, you’ve got my attention. Chronicle ain’t the best movie ever made, but in spite of its generally predictable plot movements, the film surprised me repeatedly.  No one ever said this was a movie about a super hero.

DeHaan, as Andrew, is such an uncanny match for Leo DiCaprio, aged 14 (Luke Brower, on Growing Pains, if you want to know), that for a while, Chronicle seems like some weird extension of those fan videos that popped up after The Phantom Menace came out (the first time), when the Star Wars fanverse was fervently trying to anticipate which teen heartthrob would be cast as the teen Anakin Skywalker. If you told me that Chronicle is meant as a response to, or repatriation of, the fall of Anakin Skywalker, I’d believe you. Star Wars sight gags are whacked over our heads more than once as Andrew, his cousin Matt, and their friend Steve are anointed with super-awesomeness and begin to explore the extent of their telekinesis. One of them clutches a lightsabre as they run riot through a toy store; and keep an eye on the license plate of the car that Steve shoves around with his mind, which reads JE3I. Yep: the Force is strong with these ones.

Thankfully, at pretty much no point in the movie do any of the principal characters have tortured nights of the soul wondering how they can use these powers to help people. Of course they don’t: 16-year-old boys never would. (Kick-Ass musta been a real weirdo.) In Chronicle, the boys prefer instead to focus on a) telekinesis-enhanced jackass stunts and horseplay, and b) pushing themselves with near-athletic devotion to see how far they can go. They behave, in a word, like douchebags. This helps take the piss out of the genre, even as the script is doing its best to chuck the piss back in, with lines about Wittgenstein and the nature of hubris. If there’s a flaw here, it’s simply in the fact that teenagers like Andrew, Matt and Steve veer wildly from vaguely pathetic to flat-out unlikeable, which makes them rough choices as protagonists. Chronicle does a good job of investing us in Andrew’s story, though, even if Matt and Steve remain thin, vaguely distasteful caricatures.

I do not generally like the fake-doc style, the Paranormal Activity / Devil Inside /Diary of the Dead thing. It pulls me repeatedly out of any movie on simple questions of motivation: why are they filming this? Why this shot, right now? (Why is there an uber-cute blonde co-ed shadowing the three boys at parties, with an apparently ceaseless need to video-blog?) Chronicle goes well out of its way to establish why Andrew is obsessively videotaping everything; in fact it goes too far out of its way, making such an insistent point of it (it insists upon itself!) that the film only drives me to interrogate the image even further, looking for cracks in the logic. With that said, Chronicle has a working brain behind its approach, never more in evidence when Andrew/the director cotton to the fact that with telekinetic powers, Andrew/the film have a telekinetic camera.

So after about half a film of circumstantially establishing why ever moment would be filmed with a handheld camera being controlled by one of the main characters, the second half of Chronicle opens up considerably on a visual level, because Andrew’s superbrain can act as Chronicle’s jib arm and camera crane. The image floats angelically above the dormant heroes as they contemplate their power; it follows them up into the sky for what I’d now call the definitive first-flight sequence in the history of superhero movies. (They had me at “it’s so cold.” Of course it’s cold! And windy! Nobody wears a nightie in Chronicle’s flying scenes!) And with this clever thinking established in the meta-relationship between the filmmakers within and without, Chronicle completely puts paid all my worry about motivated cameras in its grand finale: the inevitable superfight. For the first time in the movie, every single shot in the superfight is completely justifiable, because if two superteenagers are beating each other to death in the skies above downtown Seattle, every human within a fifteen-block radius would, of course, have their iPhone out – when they weren’t running for their lives.

I can’t begin to imagine the process of conceiving and blocking Chronicle’s final conflict, which explodes the scope of the film so much (while still hewing consistently to the established set of rules) that it seems to signal the arrival of a new, big-time Hollywood image-maker in director Josh Trank. Chronicle frequently feels like a director demo reel, but even as such, it’s a very, very good one. The gimmick might be hoary, and for the life of me I’m not sure the film truly convinces that it needed to be shot in the way it was shot – the story is surely identical, if staged conventionally. But there’s something about the strength of the image systems that carry me through. Chronicle has its cake and eats it: it never abandons the language of amateur video, yet the content of those amateur images will make your eyes pop. This is a good job, and a good movie.