Sometimes when the stars align just right, you will go into a movie theater with high expectation and walk out 90-120 minutes later with a sense of fulfillment.
Friday was one of those times.
On to the review!
On Friday I saw Chronicle, the first movie of 2012 that I dared hope would be good. While The Grey surprised me, all I expected from that one was camp, so it was easy to exceed my expectations. For Chronicle I actually had the audacity to expect a good movie. Crazy, right?
Fortunately for me I was not disappointed. Chronicle balances out an excellent cast of unknowns with a good plot, just-good-enough special effects and some damn good set pieces. I feel that casting unknown actors was even more important for this step-brother of a superhero movie, because its' found-footage style would have been far too distracting if everyone in front of the camera were easily recognizable.
Even better, these new kids were all perfect in their roles. Since character development heavily influences the plot, I'll try not to go too deeply into each character. Alex Russell plays Matt, the type of high school kid who reads Descartes, is too smart for his own good and knows it. His cousin, Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is the angry-looking one from the trailers, and once you get his back story you kind of don't blame him. Rounding out the group is Steve (Michael B. Jordan), the kid who succeeds at anything and everything he tries to do.
A good 95% of the movie is seen through the eyes of Andrew's camera, and his justifications for carrying it around make sense. In fact, this whole movie seems to have been written by someone who actually had a normal teenaged childhood, because there's nothing in this movie that I couldn't see myself or my friends and classmates doing. Yes, a few reactions are overreactions, but even those are believable enough when you factor in teenage hormones.
Even the circumstance under which they 'develop' their powers is realistic (well, as realistic as gaining the ability to fly using only your mind can be.) More importantly, everything percolates throughout. They don't just find out one day that they can do anything they want. It's a slow, gradual process that comes to them through practice.
Of course, when you factor in three teenagers at various stages of maturity, all leading three vastly different lives, there's no surprise when things break down. Again, I really liked this movie, so I'll refrain from being a jerkface and will say as little about the plot as I possibly can.
Just know that it struck me as believable, and while the series of events that would need to occur are just a little bit of a stretch, they can and have happened in the real world. (Again, without the super powers.)
The effects are good, and I think by going to grainy hand-held camera they were able to shave a couple bucks off the FX budget. But for all I know, they just blew the saved production money on glow sticks. Seriously, a barn rave?
The other part that I thought was pretty cool was the decision to film as much of the movie as possible with cameras that would be on-set. So on the few occasions where Andrew isn't using his camera, you'll look through the eyes of security footage, police cameras or cell phone cameras. There are just two parts where this is undoable, but the film still ends up being a good 98% hand-held.
So there you have it. A short(er) review because I have very little to make fun of and don't want to spoil the details of the plot, because this is a fairly plot-driven film. At 83 minutes, it stays sharp and doesn't give itself any time to drag.
Check out Chronicle if you like superhero movies of any kind, and especially ones that don't already have decades of mythos to work around. I like it better than a huge majority of the DC/Marvel works of recent years, and I can't compare it to my favorite indie films because most of those are comedies. It's still no Batman but it's a load better than anything else DC has shit out in the last few years.
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