Chronicle

Chronicle is one of those “found footage” type of movies where the main character is filming a video for some reason. In this case it is the teen Andrew, who seems to have a lot of problems. The main reason he seems to be filming is to document the abuse by his father, a former firefighter who lost his job after an injury and taking care of his wife ailing from cancer. So they don’t have a lot of money despite Andrew buying this new camera.

Andrew is also a sullen and outsider teenager who is picked on at school and thought a creep by girls. His Matt cousin seems to be his only friend and one day, Matt’s friend Steve gets him to document with his camera a mysterious hole in the grounds that he and Matt found. It goes deep and they find some crystalline object that gives out vibrations and noises and the next shot is of the guys suddenly having telekinetic powers and moving things with their minds.

For the most part the trio start hanging out together more, advancing in their powers but still pretty much just using it for small time parlor tricks. Matt and Steve tries to get Andrew to socialize more, but of course Andrew still feels left out. Andrew strengthens his power until he can crush cars and buildings and fly in the air, while Steve and Matt think they are going too far. Eventually Andrew flies into rages against the world while Matt tries to defuse the situation and calm him down, but it is too late.

I was thinking this was the atypical teen-gets-superpowers type of movie, where often they become heroes but still remian outsiders; Andrew becomes a supervillain instead and it made me wonder that there seems to be a fine line separating the creation of a superhero and a supervillain.

While we can feel sympathetic to Andrew’s myriad of problems, I feel he doesn’t do very much on his own to become more of an insider and continues to blame other people for his problems. For instance he doesn’t seem to help around the house very much although we can see he loves his mother. (Films seem to think a hacking cough signifies a terminal illness.) The character of Andrew’s father needed to be more humanized instead of a monster. Overall I felt the video filming aspect was unnecessary and that we would feel more connected to the characters without it, and with some background music. There is also another video filming some of these events, a teen girl who films for her blog, which was a conceit that I didn’t think worked either.