Chronicle (2012)

I remember having vivid dreams when I was younger in which I had the ability to start flying just by willpower and having the feeling that I finally had the feeling I knew how to do it. Of course I ended up in being disappointed when I woke up and couldn’t. It’s a dream I assume a lot of people have and Chronicle takes the idea of such a dream and makes it a reality. What would you do?

Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan), Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) and Steven Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan) are three teenagers who all attend the same school. Andrew has an abusive father and not really open to others and is constantly filming everything he does. The only friend he has is Matt. They head over to a party and Andrew meets Montgomery. The three of them discover something mysterious in the surrounding woods. It doesn’t take long before they find out they suddenly have superpowers. Initially their power is small and they use it to pull pranks. They decide to set some rules in using their powers, but as that grows though it seems that it seems to magnify their personalities resulting in some worrying consequences.

Now this is a found footage film and I must say that if it really was found footage, especially towards the end, the editors probably would have found a container full of devices in order to piece this movie together. For the most part of the movie though only the one camera is used, which Andrew is holding. What I thought was a clever trick is that once these guys have their superpowers they also use this to free up the camera as they can move it with their mind. It’s an original idea, which also makes the footage more dynamic.

Chronicle was a movie I really enjoyed. The actors act completely natural and act like you would expect teenagers to do. It has a lot of fun scenes and some great action set pieces. When I started watching this I was not expecting much from it, but ended up liking it a lot.

Score: 7

6 thoughts on “Chronicle (2012)

  1. I loved this one too. And I think the found footage was very cleverly used. What was great to see was also how they build up the persons in it, letting us get to know them a bit more so we cared for them, especially the central guy. I thought the ending was a little tad cheesy/easy, but not worse than I bought it. It’s a very good debut film and I hope to see more of those guys in the future.

    • Yeah, it really set it up greatly and agree that the ending was an easy one, but the story had to go somewhere. Interested as well to see more of their work.

  2. Really enjoyed this film. One of the better uses of “found footage” in a long time, especially as it felt like we are getting to a point of found footage fatigue. They made it have an actual use in the film.

    It definitely is a tale of boys will be boys with some disastrous consequences.

  3. I wasn’t too keen on this one as I don’t care for found footage style, but I’m glad I got over it. I enjoyed this more than I thought.

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