After seeing the advertisements for the movie Chronicle, I admit, I was intrigued. I was further intrigued when many reviewers said it was a movie worth watching.
A few friends were going this past Saturday, so I latched on.
The positive reviews are all categorically wrong. Chronicle was not a good movie. It was a great idea, with a very poor delivery.
Why?
1. The hand-cam filming was quaint at first, but it quickly became difficult to manage as the action scenes ramped up. This is evidenced most severely when the camera angle cuts to that of a grainy black and white security video with no sound, then back to a camera being held by a news crew.
2. I don't know what high school you went to, but my high school was nothing like that depicted in Chronicle. Now I understand that Hollywood will glorify certain aspects to such a degree that thousand-year-old vampires will want to spend their time going through high school again (shame on you, Twilight for assuming ANYONE would want to spend an extra week in high school, let alone decades!), but with hand-camera filming providing realism, 30-year-old "seniors" really stole the authenticity.
3. I get that an adolescent with repressed anger issues could go berserk, especially if pressed with too much negative stimulus, but that also assumes that same adolescent would remain in his crummy condition upon discovery and mastery of a ridiculous power. From the commercials, you can see that the boys learn how to fly and crush cars with their minds. This opens all kinds of doors that are quite thoroughly (and I think accurately) explored in the movie Jumper. Not so much in Chronicle.
4. The movie dragged. No excuse for this one. It was not a long movie, and it felt like it lasted forever.
In summary: the movie tries too hard to hard to give realism to the awkward nature of adolescent boys, and doesn't catch the imagination of what super powers of this magnitude would generate. It ended up a cute/sad story, and it should have been much more. Skip it.
Quality: 2
Watchability: 2
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