Chronicle

We’ve all been there right? Where you watch a movie where either the trailer is the best bit, or where the trailer ruins the film?

Unfortunately, Chronicle falls into the latter. You see, I knew too much about the movie although I thought I knew very little, and I just kept wanting the guy to ‘go bad’ and for it to get to what I thought would be the good stuff.

The film is very much along the lines of Cloverfield, one of the three teenagers decides to start filming everything for no reason really, whilst at a party they discover ‘something’ that gives them powers…

The middle part of the film is the boys getting stronger and being able to do more with these powers they’ve received, some better than others, some attempts more successful then others.

The story, in my opinion, is really quite clever, or at least it should have been. It’s fun watching the guys as they learn to use their powers but when things start to go a bit wrong, well, instead of being the pinnacle of the film, it’s just a bit flat.

I think the main issue is the entire film, literally everything bar a couple of shots are told from the shaky cam ‘found footage’ style and it does start to grate, quite a lot actually.

The finale of the film looks great, probably, I was just wishing for some actual clean shots of the action, show me what’s going on, nice to see camera phones etc but god damn it show me what’s going on!

The acting is good, I was particular impressed with Michael B. Jordan (can only imagine why he decided to use the ‘B’!) he’s done a lot of really good TV and it’s good to see him make the leap successfully to movies.

Dane DeHaan is the main character but spends a lot of the time behind the camera so it’s difficult to say how good he is, Alex Russell is good in what is essentially his first role.

Josh Trank is the co-writer (with Max Landis) and director and it’s his first movie, previously he’s wrote and directed the TV series The Kill Point which I’m not really familiar with, but I hope he doesn’t stick with the shaky camera look the whole time.

Overall I have to say I was disappointed with the movie, I was hoping for so much more and whilst it certainly had it’s moments, it was just lacking something I can’t quite put my finger on.