Chronicle

Chronicle is a movie about three teenagers who discover a mysterious thing that gives them the power of telekinesis. They soon discover that they can do some pretty impressive stuff with it, including flying and moving very heavy things.

I watched the movie because I recently found The Death and Return of Superman on YouTube and really enjoyed it, and Chronicle is written by the same person. That was probably not a great context to go in with, because the tone is completely different. Other than the fact that they're both about super-powered people, there's not a lot of common ground.

The film uses a gimmick of having everything be actual footage that exists within the world of the film — Andrew, one of the protagonists, begins the film by acquiring a camera with which he films most of the rest of the footage in the film, the rest being made up of security cameras and similar. It didn't really work for me.

It's an interesting idea, but I found it mostly annoying, although I will say in its favour that I did like the way Matt started looking at the camera instead of Andrew when talking to him, it was a clever illustration of the way Andrew used the camera to separate himself from the world. I also noticed a couple of bits near  the end though where it's not clear what camera could actually be capturing the video we're seeing.

The biggest problem though was that it really just seemed like a pretty standard super-hero origin story pretending to be something more. As super-hero origin stories go it wasn't bad, but it really seemed like a prologue, as they always do.

Film-makers always seem to think that the origin story is the interesting bit. They never go "OK, you all know who Spider-Man is, watch him fight some super-villains." they have to show us how ordinary highschool student Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains his powers, learns valuable lessons and decides to be a hero. Yeah yeah, with great power comes great responsibility, we get it. Just give us Spider-Man.

And I think that's why I didn't enjoy this film all that much. I'm sick of origin stories, I just want super heroes to be super heroes. I didn't hate it, but I did feel like I'd seen it all before.