Chronicle Review

• 3rd Feb 2012

A damn-sight smarter than every other teen movie on the block, Chronicle is a cheerfully dark mash-up of everything from Carrie and Superman through to Cloverfield, Kick Ass and Akira.

Lonely, isolated Andrew lives in a state of constant fear. His mother’s slowly dying and his alcoholic, unemployed father divides his time between making Andrew’s life hell and placing desperate phone calls to unsympathetic medical providers he can’t afford to pay.

Andrew buys an old camera with a view to protecting himself from his dad’s violent rages, but life behind the lens soon becomes a habit. Footage of a typical day at school reveals that other kids view him as a creepy loser and he’s a prime target for bullying and abuse.

In any realist narrative, this would turn into We Need to Talk About Andrew. Instead, things take a sharp turn into comic book territory when Andrew’s philosophy-spouting cousin Matt and Matt’s impossibly charismatic mate Steve invite Andrew into a cave to film This Big Pulsing Rock-Formation Emitting Sound and Light, which promptly explodes all over them.

Predictably, the boys survive but with superpowers that just get more super the more they use them – and in Andrew’s case, that’s definitely a very bad thing indeed. Levitating teddy bears to freak out children pretty quickly degenerates into working out what it means to be an ‘apex predator’.

What follows is a much closer examination of the clichéd relationship between Hero and Nemesis than Hollywood usually bothers with. You know Dr Xavier and Magneto? Like that, but you’re rooting for Magneto. (In a simple but effective scene, Andrew uses his new powers to do something that, although unpleasant, is hardly evil and the woman beside me audibly gasped.)

Chronicle isn’t flawless, and its insistence on the hand-held camera gimmick means a few inelegant solutions. The most notable is Casey, ostensibly a love-interest for Matt who just happens to film everything for her blog, but in reality is merely a plot device to show what’s going on when Andrew’s not around. Casey’s presence also serves to highlight that, without exception, every other female role in this movie is also a mere cipher.

On the other hand, this is a solid action flick that punches well above its weight. It spends a decent amount of time on fleshing out its main character and backgrounding its unearthly premise with earthy realism – there aren’t going to be many PG13 films this year where the parlous state of American health care is a plot device. Highly recommended, even if only to see what Michael B Jordan (Wallace from The Wire) looks like now that he’s all grown up.

Clare Moody