Review: Chronicle (2012)

Chronicle (2012)

Rated PG-13 for intense action and violence, thematic material, some language, sexual content and teen drinking

Score: 3 out of 5

Back when it first came out, Chronicle was heavily marketed and often described as a dark superhero movie, a twist on the Spider-Man mythos that showed what might actually happen if you gave an ordinary, troubled teenage boy superpowers. It's an assertion that many people both then and now have disagreed with and challenged, most notably the film's screenwriter Max Landis, who argued for it more as a modern-day, gender-flipped version of Carrie and said that the only reason anybody considered it a superhero movie was because those were all the rage in 2012, the year it came out when the young Marvel Cinematic Universe was about to release the game-changing superhero team-up The Avengers. Nevertheless, both this film's director Josh Trank and two of its stars, Dane DeHaan and Michael B. Jordan, soon found themselves lined up for superhero movies on the strength of their work here, and watching it again in 2024, while the Carrie allusions are obvious, so too are the stylistic influences from the superhero movies that had flourished since Sissy Spacek burned down her senior prom in split-screen.

Watching it again in 2024, it's also a film that doesn't entirely hold up. The entire found footage angle felt extraneous to the point that it was distracting, and the characters other than the film's three protagonists all felt empty and one-dimensional. Given how short the movie was (only 83 minutes including the credits), it felt like there were a lot of efforts to trim the fat in the editing room that wound up cutting into its muscle and bone. That said, the action and special effects are still quite impressive given the small budget, the three lead actors all do very good work that shows why there was so much hype around them (even if only Jordan's career lived up to the hype in the long run), and when it's focused on its protagonists, especially its main viewpoint character Andrew, its story about a kid getting slowly but surely drunk with power is still a compelling one. It's a movie that, even with its flaws, I'd still recommend to fans of superheroes who want a darker take on the genre that nonetheless isn't as violent as The Boys or Invincible.

Set in the suburbs of Seattle, the film revolves around three teenage boys, the moody loner Andrew Detmer, his more popular cousin Matt Garetty, and Matt's friend Steve Montgomery, who gain telekinetic powers and the ability to fly after discovering a strange artifact buried in the woods. For much of the first half of the film, it leans very much into the power fantasy side of things, as these three boys use their newfound abilities to pull pranks on unsuspecting people, flip up girls' skirts, do dumb Jackass-style stunts, participate in the school's talent show, try to find out more about how they got their powers (a dead end that ultimately turns up more questions than answers when they see that the cops are also snooping around the area), and generally enjoy the newfound freedom that comes with suddenly gaining superpowers. I bought these three as people bound together by their shared gift who reacted to it not with the idealism of Peter Parker, but with the exact amount of maturity you'd expect (i.e. something that they still need to learn through experience). Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan were both compelling and charismatic as Matt and Steve, the "cool" guys among the trio, but the most interesting by far, and the one the film seems most interested in, is Andrew. An emo kid with the Worst Life Ever, Andrew has few friends other than his cousin Matt, he's raised by an abusive, layabout drunk of a father while his mother is slowly dying of cancer, his neighborhood has drug dealers on his block, and he's started filming his day-to-day life seemingly because he has nothing else to do. Dane DeHaan may have been playing a walking stereotype of teen angst, but he makes the most of the role, first making Andrew feel like a guy who knows he's going nowhere in life and acts accordingly before letting him open up as his powers, and the influence of Matt and Steve, give him a new confidence in life -- before it all falls apart as he finds out the hard way that his powers haven't solved all his problems. By the end, when he's killing drug dealers and ranting about how his mastery of his powers makes him an "apex predator," I felt like I was watching a school shooter. DeHaan was scary as hell in the role, delivering the kind of performance that makes me wish he'd gotten a better movie than The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to play a supervillain in.

It's in the film's structure that it kind of lost me, and much of it ironically comes down to its main hook. To put it simply, most of this movie's problems could've been solved by simply dropping the found footage conceit entirely and making a straightforward, traditionally shot movie. It's a conceit that the movie already strains to adhere to, especially by the end when it has to find a way to justify the manner in which it stages its bombastic fight scenes and dramatic speeches with all the flourish one would expect from the third act of a superhero movie. Despite the title Chronicle, almost none of the film feels like an actual, y'know, chronicle that these people had filmed themselves. Andrew's insistence on having a camera film him at all times in order to record his increasingly bizarre life, his powers letting him move the camera around to places where a human can't film from in order to get a better angle, is already a rather thin explanation, and it takes a turn for the ridiculous when he psychically seizes the camera phones of a bunch of tourists at the Space Needle so he can film his big speech with a bit more cinematic flair. I wonder if this is why the film was as short as it was, that there were originally supposed to be a lot more scenes fleshing out the supporting cast that they couldn't justify from the perspective of this being found footage. As a result, characters come off as either one-note stereotypes, like Andrew's abusive father who exists only to constantly treat his son like dirt and get his comeuppance later on, or one-dimensional ciphers, like Ashley Hinshaw's character Casey, whose only characterization is that she's Matt's on-and-off girlfriend and a vlogger in order to make her a Camera 2 for certain scenes.

If the film really wanted to weave the found footage style into a story that leaned into the dark side of the superhero genre, it could've just as easily done so by focusing more on Casey. Make her a full-blown secondary protagonist and as much a viewpoint character as Andrew, an outsider to the protagonists' lives and friendship who's witnessing the events of the film as an ordinary human, and then have her take center stage in the third act once the mayhem begins. Do what Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice later tried to do, or what Cloverfield successfully did with a giant monster movie, and show how terrifying a big superhero battle would be from the perspective of the civilians on the ground without superpowers. During act three, follow Casey as she and others fight to survive and not get caught in the crossfire of the mother of all street brawls, all while she tries to help her boyfriend out, cutting away occasionally to the combatants themselves as they settle their scores. On that note, more focus on Casey also would've fleshed out Matt as a character thanks to their relationship, and by extension the other people in their lives. After all, Carrie, one of this movie's main inspirations, wasn't told entirely from the perspective of its title character, but also from those of Sue Snell and Chris Hargensen, the popular girls whose actions wind up setting the stage for the tragedy to come. Finally, Casey's scenes, where she doesn't have superpowers that allow her to fly the camera around, would've made a great stylistic contrast with Andrew's, with her half of the film looking and feeling like a grounded, naturalistic found footage film while the other half had Andrew's theatricality.

At least said theatricality afforded the film some very well-done action scenes. Despite a budget of only $15 million, this was a very good-looking film, one of the benefits of the found footage style (and probably the reason why this movie used it) being that the lo-fi feel of the film makes it easier to cover up dodgy special effects. The seams are visible here, and there are quite a few shots where you can tell it's CGI, but the effects are never distractingly bad, and quite a few of them are very impressive, from the boys assembling LEGO sets with their minds to the scenes of them in flight. The shift into action and horror later in the film is also handled very well, as Andrew clashes with street thugs, bullies, the police, and eventually his friends in fights that range from gritty and vicious brawls to the genuinely spectacular. This movie may have felt like it had a few too many scenes cut for its own good, but it is remarkably straightforward about what it's about, never feeling like it's spinning its wheels and always progressing forward.

The Bottom Line

Chronicle needed another pass on its script, either abandoning the found footage angle entirely or finding a better way to make it work than they ultimately went with. That said, as a version of Carrie for the internet age that combines that classic story of teen rage with a superhero motif, it's still a diamond in the rough.