Note: If you have any interest at all in seeing this film, I firmly advise that you go in completely cold and don’t read this until after you’ve seen it.
I don’t know if Chronicle is the first found-footage superhero film, but I’m certain it’s the best—and will remain so for a very long time. I had no idea what the film was about, and when it opened with a shot of a gloomy teenager filming the door to his bedroom while his drunk father angrily shouts to let him in, I groaned.
Goddammit, another one of those movies. When the kid said he was going to start filming everything, I groaned again. Dying mother? Ugh. Ugly kid clad in black? Blarg. By the time the kid started filming his cousin driving him to school and brought up Schopenhauer, I was about ready to check out.
Then it took a turn from the typical High-School-Sucks Movie into Horror, and I started to get interested. Then it took another turn into the Jackass realm. And just when I thought it would settle on Superhero Film, it just lingered on having a lot of fun with superpowers. But the best twists are saved until the end. Needless to say, when one character threw a baseball at another and it stopped dead in midair, I was hooked.
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